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Covert, William Chalmers, 
1864- 1942. 


Religion in the heart, and 
Other addresses 


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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
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https://archive.org/details/religioninheartoO0cove 


‘Religion 
In the Heart 


AND OTHER ADDRESSES 


WILLIAM CHALMERS COVERT, D.D. 


General Secretary, Board of Christian Education of Presbyterian 
Church in the U.S. A. 


New York Chicago 


Fleming H. Revell Company 


London and Edinburgh 





Copyright, MCMXXvVI, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 


New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street 


I trust it will be agreeable to my many 
loyal hearers in the parish of the First 
Presbyterian Church of Chicago, where for 
nearly a score of years life was a rare bit of 
mutual fellowship and happiness, if here I 
dedicate this volume of sermons to them. 
They deserve a worthier recognition at my 


hands for that long period of affectionate 
toleration and inspiring co-operation. But 
they can have nothing out of my life from 
all those years in which more of my inner- 
most self was released than these messages 
originally prepared and delivered to meet 
thew stimulating spiritual hunger. 





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Foreword 


rf lease of a pulpit message should afford 
a well-nigh complete revealing of an 
3 honest man’s mind and heart. Particu- 
d it be the case when his themes traverse 
the unchanging fields where lie the heart’s major 
spiritual needs and carry him into the realms of 
those great spiritual realities he seeks for the 
solace of those who hear. These addresses that 
follow will belie me if, among other things, they 
do not reveal the joy that has pervaded the process 
of their preparation and delivery. No joys inci- 
dent to a career of Christian work are comparable 
to the satisfying emotions born of the privileges 
of a Christian pulpit. This is true where there are 
no inhibitions of fear or doubt, restraining liberty 
and undermining confidence. When through a long 
preaching contact familiarity breeds equanimity 
and spiritual rest, then the soul of a preacher ought 
not only to find itself but to unfold new powers 
and claim new and sweeter joys with every hour. 
The utterance from a pulpit that is passionless 
and sicklied ‘with indifference cannot have been 
born in joy and can waken only joyless conse- 
quences. The crowded program of parish and 


5 





6 FOREWORD 


community life in a great city may not muffle the 
voice but is likely to touch the intellect with a 
deadening effect, unless a man courageously does 
battle on behalf of a quiet hour and a relentless 
régime of mental and spiritual feeding. These 
messages bear in their form and content the marks 
of the ruthless and decimating demands of those 
prior claims of human need that lie in the clam- 
orous and suffering life of a city. But if, withal, 
there be here and there breaking forth a gleam of 
that joy which lives below every spoken word, the 
obvious inadequacies of the treatment of great 
subjects here discussed perhaps will be passed 
without comment. 


We CoG: 
Philadelphia, Pa. 


VIII. 


aE: 


Contents 


. RELIGION IN THE HEART . 


Proverbs 4:23; Romans 5:5 


. THE Man Jesus Curis? . 


I Timothy 2:5 


. THe Crty 


Revelation 21:16 


. PLtus AND MINUs . 


Matthew 6:33; 25:28 


. COMRADES OF THE SHINING PLATEAU. 


Mark 9:2-7, 17-18 


. SPRINGTIME IN THE T'WENTY-THIRD PsALM . 


Psalm 23 


. A RADIATING PERSONALITY 


Matthew 5:14 


PERFECT PEACE .. : 
Isaiah 26:3; John 14:27; Phin brane Yi vg 


. Man’s MIND 


Matthew 22:37; een 8: ro; I ape as 3 


. IMMORTALITY . 


II Timothy 1:10 


. MarTHA AND MARY 


Luke 10:38-40 


PRAYER 
II Kings 19: yy 


II 
23 
37 
55 
65 


77 


87 


. 103 


Ai 3 


423 


hp 


. 141 


8 CONTENTS 


ALLE: OUR CHEDREN ) Oly Wino hier vwkh ail? aiken ae 
Acts 2:39; Mark 10:16 


ALVUCRAUN (ON THE (GRASS ony. Pe oan as ee a eee 


Psalm 72:6 

Mi DEGRA WRT, WITT, yen one Ne ie eo 
Luke 13:34 

OVE Gop ‘in Firs WoRLD)) 20S) nee an ee 


Genesis I: 


I 


RELIGION IN THE HEART 


“ She set a rose to blossom in her hair 
The day fatth died— 
‘How glad, said she, ‘and free, at last I go, 
And life is wide, 
But through long nights she stared into the dark 
And knew she lied.” 
—FANNY LEA. 


“The happiest heart that ever beat 
Was in some quiet breast 
That found the common daylight sweet 
And left to Heaven the rest.” 
—Joun VANCE CHENEY. 


“ But I cannot stay God from His ploughing, 
I, the lord of the field 
While I stand waiting 
Hts shoulders loom upon me from the mist, 
He has gone past me, down the furrow, shouting 
and singing 
(I had said, it shall rest for a season, 
The larks had built in the grass. . . 
He will not let my field lie fallow.” 
—Karr, WILson BAKER. 


I 
RELIGION IN THE HEART 


“Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are 
the issues of life.”—PROVERBS 4: 23. 


“The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the 
Holy Ghost which is given unto us.”’—ROMANS 5: 5. 


~PHRISTIANITY answers, as no other 
92 faith, the age-old and tormenting ques- 
‘2H tions with which life challenges the in- 
~——-& tellect. It answers the question as to 
the origin of all things. It locates a centre of moral 
authority in the universe. It covers all human ex- 
perience and destiny with a loving superintendence 
and sets up a personal and paternal relationship 
between man and the Creator of all things. It is 
at these high points of human anxiety that the 
Christian religion satisfies the mind. 

But religion certainly must be something else 
besides a satisfying intellectual acquisition. If it 
be simply a satisfaction resident in the mind, 
taking up unshaking positions in the intellect, 
standing on foundations of perfectly good logic, 
nothing more, then its appeal to the whole human 
race, high and low, wise and otherwise, is a failure. 
If it be a thing of mind exclusively, then it must 


11 





12 RELIGION IN THE HEART 


be set down as another beautiful, philosophical cult 
among the thousands. It may explain the universe, 
but that is not enough. It may work out a theo- 
logical system that meets successfully the meta- 
physical requisites and the logical necessities, but 
to heart-sick, sin-burdened, hopeless men and 
women, these achievements are not enough. 

Does our Christian religion function in the realm 
of human feeling in a sane and satisfying way? 
We live more largely in our feelings than in any 
other realm. If there be no realization of religion 
possible in the realm of our emotions, nor any grip 
of its reality on our feelings, nor any tangible un- 
doubted reaction from it in what we call the heart- 
life, then the Christian religion is doomed to dry 
up and die in the cold, high levels of the human 
intellect. Behind us, like the skeletons of lost 
caravans in the freezing heights of Tibet, lie re- 
ligions and cults that insisted on ministering to the 
world of sorrow and sin exclusively through the 
mind. Their devotees starved to death on maxims 
and epigrams. ‘They despised as dangerous and 
deceitful the feelings and all emotional reactions 
of religion and insisted that what men needed was 
intellectual light upon life and its problems. These 
old philosophers soon parted company with a needy 
race they could not help. On the other hand, the 
old mystics swept men to the other extreme. To 
them God and truth were incomprehensible, the 
revelations of God in Christ Jesus defied the grasp 


RELIGION IN THE HEART 13 


of mind. Therefore, religion must forego the sanc- 
tions of the intellect. They insisted that ignorance 
was the mother of devotion. They rose as a living 
protest against a dead intellectual Church. They 
saw the Church with her metaphysics and philos- 
ophy and theology cold and corrupt. Men were 
wise and learned, but morally dead and religiously 
inert and helpless. Men believed with their brains 
but denied what they believed by lives that were 
cold and fruitless. 

Thus arose the various groups of mystics. They 
lighted the fires in the heart. They sought to warm 
into life again the religion of Jesus that had chilled 
and died in the intellectual conclusions of ecclesi- 
astical debates. Their pendulum swung too far. 
They gave no countenance to the mind, holding 
that it killed the spirit and choked the life of the 
soul with its definitions, arguments and syllogisms. 
So they cast it forth from the temple and turned 
exclusively for their interpretation and understand- 
ing of religion to the heart, where they believed the 
Spirit of God spoke directly and in a way to be felt 
and understood. This theory of religion landed 
these holy men into trouble. Feelings broke from 
the moorings of common sense and orderly living, 
and swept them from things sane and sound in 
human experience. They found high mountain 
peaks of spiritual exaltation and lived in the glori- 
ous sunlight of lofty altitudes of spirituality, but 
they allowed the poor miserable world to suffer and 


14 RELIGION IN THE HEART 


die, unaided. Religion became for them a per- 
sonal, exclusive, subjective, spiritual luxury. It 
made for a holy selfishness which expressed itself 
in superb acts of self-abnegation! It repelled the 
ordinary man by its unhealthy spiritual reactions. 
So Mysticism passed. 

Has the Christian religion something in it that 
makes it a practical, recognizable thing in my daily 
experience? Is it something not only that I can 
believe but can also feel at work in my heart and 
life? If evil things move my emotions and thrill 
in my blood, may I not justly expect some opposite 
corresponding effect of the good? You may. It 
would appear that about seven-eighths of our re- 
ligion lies in the always troubled and restless sea of 
feelings where most of our spiritual needs have 
their origin. It is remarkable with what little 
amount of thinking we may get on, if we have the 
assurances of a personal experience of our religion 
in this vast, needy realm of human feeling. This 
is not to deprecate the vital place thinking has in 
our faith, but to show what a satisfying supplement 
to our thinking faith provides. 

Among the things good men yearn for as 
they face life and its alterations of experiences 
are: equanimity, happiness, moral enthusiasm. 
Now, will the Christian faith provide that even- 
mindedness which enables a man to hold his way 
and keep his spirit in wise restraint no matter what 
outward conditions may be? Can a man get a 


RELIGION IN THE HEART 15 


rigid steadfastness of character and a persistency 
in the ongoing of his moral conduct by taking into 
his life the things of the Christian religion? 

One feels this to be vital to his dignity as a man. 
He cannot reconcile a restive and disturbed state 
of mind with any kind of solidity of character or 
worthwhile career. Men want an anchorage that 
holds and while holding makes them conscious of 
its unyielding grip upon the things beneath, assur- 
ing them that they are safe and at rest, blow winds, 
roll seas, beat billows, come what will. We do not 
wish to be told that these disturbing things about 
us do not exist, but are simply claims of error and 
must be denied and dismissed before any equanim- 
ity can come. This is asking too much of our 
common sense and honest sensibilities. We know 
that needles prick, and teeth ache, and fever burns, 
and a thousand hurts born out of the physical 
basis of our life stand ready to torment us. When 
through the channels of our real nerves we take 
joys and pleasurable feelings, we must not deny 
the reality of those same nerves when ill and hurt 
they report to our sensoriums the opposite experi- 
ences. No one respects an equanimity that is born 
of blindness to the facts of life. 

A faith that is open-eyed to sickness and sorrow 
and death is the only faith that can bring me 
serenity and steadfastness. Men want a Saviour 
who will look into the peril of the black, stormy 
night as a reality and say to the waves, “ Be still, 


16 RELIGION IN THE HEART 


for the Son of God commands,” and to His dis- 
ciple, “‘ Be calm, for the Son of God is your com- 
panion.” He had the living realities of life in mind 
when He said, ‘‘ Come unto me all ye that know 
the reality of labour and are heavy laden with 
actual burdens your sensibilities are aware of and 
I will give you rest.” He does just this. 

We wish to be happy. It is not the main object 
of living, but we crave it. We have a right to it. 
Joy puts such a radiant atmosphere over all life 
that it becomes a poor, cramped, meagre thing if 
there be in it no real happiness. Happiness seems 
to release the intellectual and physical powers and 
give them a scope and a sense of amplitude that 
otherwise they never know. 

Happy people succeed. They achieue They 
are our best workers, our conspicuous salesmen, 
our most striking leaders, our best teachers. It is 
the radiant countenance and the cheerful spirit that 
gets farthest into your office when you are busy. 
It is the cheer-giving man that engages you longest 
when you are burdened with a big schedule. You 
want your children taught by happy teachers. You 
want happy foremen to organize happiness in your 
factory. You want happiness at your meals and 
joy in your dinner company. ‘The sermon or 
anthem that overflows with spiritual happiness 
touches and helps. Sidney Smith, in his lectures 

n “ Benevolent Affections,” well said, ““ Mankind 
is always happier for having been happy. So that 


RELIGION IN THE HEART 17 


if you make a man happy now, you make him 
happy twenty years hence by the memory of it.” 

This is not some superficial grace, nor some 
popular affectation. It is not something born of a 
complacent, good nature. Every genuine smile, 
every radiant countenance is a triumph of the love 
of God in the heart. The thing that beams in the 
face first works like a sweet magic fire in the heart 
and there kindles the light that glows later upon 
the face. The doctrine of God’s care over us, and 
the teaching of Jesus concerning our relation to 
Him and to our fellows, work to make men happy 
and to give birth to good cheer. It is un-Christian 
to frown and pour out gloom upon people. It is a 
denial of the faith we confess. It is re-enacting 
again the tragic denial of Peter though under 
different guise. In the quest for happiness today, 
people, old and young, are going far astray. They 
are missing the mark in thinking happiness is born 
of things. Things they get. Things they do, 
things they see. Things! 

The physical accessories of happiness are negli- 
gible. Dancing—a thing of physical enjoyment— 
is taking the time, the energy, the modesty, the 
mentality of young people in the quest for happi- 
ness. It is at present an obsession, the like of 
which the generation has never known. It has 
been reported that the twelve largest public dance 
halls of Chicago gather each week an average of 
90,000 young people, while nightly in five hundred 


18 RELIGION IN THE HEART 





other halls many other thousands gather! They 
seek joy. The extreme and indelicate forms of 
dancing not only at degrading dance halls, but in 
select parties at clubs and hotels by our own young 
people, do not bring happiness and are wholly un- 
pardonable. The jazz music born of the jungle, 
sensuous and seductive, is spoiling the purity and 
beauty of our young people and bidding for pas- 
sions that stain. These are among the false lures 
that call when men are looking for happiness. 
Only as we plant the seeds of real joy in our hearts, 
by taking Christ’s principle into our life, will real 
happiness come. 

Moral earnestness, a most satisfying accompani- 
ment of the Christian life, is the mainspring of un- 
selfish service. Men need a reservoir of spiritual 
power to keep their Christian program steady in 
the face of obstacles without and temperamental 
dissuasion within. This is a supreme heart element 
without which no program of philanthropy or 
religion can long survive. The commanding reso- 
lution to say and do, making thereby a definite 
commitment, often comes amidst the aroused 
earnestness of a season of revived spiritual inter- 
est. Men often respond to a call that comes with 
profound emotional experience. The emotional 
experience gave positive and compelling power to 
the will in the hour of choice. New resolutions 
were easy and a new program of work seemed 
most feasible. In the glow of that fresh impulse 


RELIGION IN THE HEART 19 


for service, every cross seemed sweet and all bur- 
dens a joy. 

But in the long, hard way that followed, the 
ecstasy of that early moment of decision subsided. 
The romance and thrill of the spiritual adventure 
died. There is something drab and tedious about 
the routine of the day’s work in the church or 
mission, people are not co-operative in their spirit. 
New ideas and visions are duly accepted by them 
as commonplace. Obstacles are frequent and the 
strain is heavy. Ere long courage weakens, joy in 
the task subsides and interest lags. ‘The moral 
pressure relaxes and the program that once ap- 
pealed no longer inspires. The explanation is 
obvious. The man’s moral enthusiasm is waning. 
The dynamic centre of the man’s life has lost its 
power. 

What churches and philanthropies and welfare 
organizations need in the long hard years of test- 
ing is not money, not organization, not leaders, but 
that spiritual fervour born of the unselfish ought- 
ness that lives only where Christ’s Cross stands. 
This alone guarantees moral fervour in the lives 
of men. 

This drives men on over difficulties and discour- 
agements and holds them steadily to the task, come 
what will! It is faith in God that generates ade- 
quate power! It holds the loyalty of men to the 
life-long program of the cross. That which glowed 
in Christ’s heart as He pressed on toward the hill 


20 RELIGION IN THE HEART 


and kept His face steadfast toward the holy but 
hostile city, must burn in us today lest we grow 
weary in well doing and faint by the way. As 
Adoniram Judson sings: 


In spite of sorrow, loss and pain, 
Our course be onward still, 

We sow on Burmah’s plain, 
We reap on Zion’s hill. 


II 


THE MAN JESUS CHRIST 


“Give us a virile Christ for these rough days! 
You painters, sculptors, show the warrior bold, 
And you who turn mere words to gleaming gold, 
Too long your lips have sounded in the pratse 
Of patience and humility. Our ways 
Have parted from the quietude of old; 

We need a man of strength with us to hold 

The very breach of Death without amaze. 

Did He not scourge from temple courts the thieves? 
And make the arch-fiend’s self again to fall? 

And blast the fig tree that was only leaves? 

And still the raging tumult of the sea? 

Did He not bear the greatest pain of all, 


Silent, upon the Cross on Calvary?” 
—Rex Bounpy. 


“O man of mine own people, I alone 

Among these alien ones can see thy face, 

I who have felt the kinship of thy race 

Burn in me, as I sit. where they intone 

Thy praises,—those who, striving to make known 

A God for sacrifice, have missed the grace 

Of Thy sweet human meaning in its place, 

Thou who art of our blood-bond and our own,” 
—FLORENCE FRANK, 


Il 
THE MAN JESUS CHRIST 


“ For there is one God and one mediator between God 
and men, the man Christ Jesus.’—I T1IMoTHY 2: 5. 


Ga\SSVKE seek a new path across a very old 
# field. Let us make a cross-section of 
v4 “aex manhood, hoping to reveal the mascu- 

YAN line elements that make men what they 
are, and then look at Christ in the light of these 
elements. It ought to be true that the greatest 
masculine Figure of all time was so genuinely and 
obviously masculine in His traits and general dis- 
position that men have been drawn to Him by the 
attraction of the purely human elements that He 
shares with them and which they see in Him, 
before they recognize the superhuman elements of 
His character. Here is a striking feature in per- 
suasive and convincing evangelism. 

We recognize that the Jesus of history has been 
feminized. The feminization, as we have it, is 
easily explained. Jesus incarnates, perfectly, as in 
no other character, the qualities of tenderness and 
gentleness and refinement which find their finest 
human expression in women. The artists, in soft- 
ening the lines of His face in order to portray these 


23 





24 THE MAN JESUS CHRIST 


lovely traits, made His features predominantly 
feminine. 

Then, unfortunately, too, the notion has coloured 
men’s thinking that goodness and purity, gentle- 
ness and virtue, were not consistent with strength 
and a full quota of red-blooded, masculine quali- 
ties. So we have been compelled to re-humanize 
and re-masculinize Jesus after the painters and 
artists and the emotionalists have discussed Him— 
but always with the same result. He is “the man 
Christ Jesus.” 

Taking man just as we have him, what are his 
distinct masculine ingredients? You assay com- 
posite minerals with a blowpipe, but we have no 
laboratory apparatus to help in analyzing man! 
He is so disguised and masked that we do not see 
what is before us when we look. That part that 
has to do with bulk or his dimensions in space is 
the small and unimportant part of this thing at 
which we look. The shrewdest and most pene- 
trating inquirer that has ever tried to tell us what 
he really saw when he looked at this “ invisible 
object ” has given it up and presented us with an 
extravagant eulogy instead of an analytical for- 
mula. Shakespeare puts into the mouth of the 
depressed, but wonderful Hamlet what may be re- 
garded as the sum total of his conclusions concern- 
ing man, when he prompts him to say: “ What a 
piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How 
infinite in faculty!—in form and moving how ex- 


THE MAN JESUS CHRIST 25 


press and admirable! In action how like an angel! 
In apprehension how like a god!. The paragon of 
animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence 
of dust? ” 

And, whether it be the unanswered question of 
this greatest knower of men in modern literature, 
or the satirical observations in the thirty-eighth 
chapter of Job, or the fiery denunciations of St. 
Paul in the first chapter of Romans, these wise men 
who speak seem to have arrived at almost the same 
conclusion, viz.: that man is an interesting, but 
insoluble problem. 

But in spite of this deadlock of the analysts and 
students in regard to man, there are clearly dis- 
coverable, easily distinguishable, native masculine 
elements in man that answer well the purpose we 
cherish. 

Something differentiates him from the other 
great department of the human race, long before 
you come to talk about his anatomical structure or 
his physiological functioning. He is something 
more than a biological product. Masculinity is 
something more than anatomy. It is a soul prop- 
erty before it is a sex-aspect. Somewhere along the 
mysterious pathway in the progress of the unborn, 
perhaps, before anatomy had issued its decree of 
individual destiny for the life-germ, God breathed 
into that potential unit, about to be ushered into 
immortality through the gateway of humanity, cer- 
tain elements—we later learned to call masculine. 


26 THE MAN JESUS CHRIST 


They were like chemical ingredients received into 
the blood stream at the fountain head, producing 
definite and permanent results. They are ele- 
mental and fixed in the tissue of life itself. When 
the masculinizing processes begin we do not know; 
but begin where they may and end where they may, 
they shape thoughts, determine traits, give char- 
acter to will power and quality to judgment, weav- 
ing a distinctive fibre into the whole warp and woof 
of life. Masculinity is a spiritual portion long 
before it is a biological distinction. Men, as men, 
bring certain elements of heart life and distinctive 
mental endowments, certain emotional qualities 
into the great total experience of the race, without 
which life should be meagre and ineffective. 

It is not difficult to show that these innate mas- 
culine qualities, when spiritualized, are the very 
qualities that Jesus puts premium on, in the calling 
of men into His service as disciples. And no man 
Is giving proper release to the inborn and unique 
qualities with which he is endowed and which make 
him different from the other great hemisphere of 
humanity, until he has put these masculine facul- 
ties upon the altar of a dedicated life. 

The present period in the religious life of the 
world is ripe for the mobilizing of these masculine 
qualities in Christian service. We shall not see the 
armies of God go through the lines of opposition in 
our strange, new, modern life and take strongholds 
of evil and garrison them with the good until men 


THE MAN JESUS CHRIST 27 


everywhere let God have His way in their lives, 
fully commandeering these distinctively masculine 
traits. When men in the church of America will 
permit these strong, masculine elements of their 
soul’s life to be harnessed to the goals of Jesus, 
then Pentecostal power will fall and fill the Church 
and all life with spiritual blessings. When men 
will permit these unique qualities of manhood to be 
sanctified and energized by the passion for service 
that brought Christ’s own blessed masculinity to 
its perfect fruitage, the Church of Christ, as His 
agent, will transform the world. 

Until our men wake to the moral meanings to 
the race of their solemn sex inheritance preserved 
in these forceful elements of masculine nature 
and measure with good conscience the obligation 
thereby imposed for leadership and service in 
society, we are not to bring our land with its mil- 
lions of men and women into fellowship with 
our Lord. 

What are some of the masculine features of 
Jesus? Jesus showed a distinct mark of masculinity 
in what we may call His race hunger. There is a 
passive race hunger in women. It is aggressive and 
dominant in man. He was the farthest removed 
from an ascetic or misanthrope of any in His gener- 
ation. He was the greatest individual, but not an 
individualist. He was gregarious. He loved the 
crowds. He was at home in vast, surging com- 
panies. He commanded them. People satisfied 


28 THE MAN JESUS CHRIST 


His human cravings and appealed to His innate 
sense of race. This made Him a cosmopolitan. 
He preached a Gospel that was adapted to vast 
social units. His Gospel of the people, for the 
people, put Him in the vanguard of a new type of 
civilization in which great groups of men best real- 
ize as groups their highest welfare. It was the 
norm of the world’s democracy. It wiped out petty 
geographical distinctions. It obliterated castes of 
colour and social differences and compelled a racial 
oneness unheard of in the story of men. 

The human source of much of that vast world 
outlook, that vision toward humanity that made of 
this provincial Palestine Jew a world citizen and 
benefactor, and the one supreme Saviour of human 
society of all ages locates in this racial hunger as 
a supreme masculine quality! This God-given 
trait, imbedded in the sex-character of man, sup- 
plied human qualifications for the divine altruism 
and unselfishness of Jesus that made Him glad to 
sacrifice everything for the sin-cursed race. This 
racial hunger that went with His masculinity 
enabled Him to thrust His redeeming truth into the 
unhappy human social relations of life. He met 
days of toil, He walked the highways misunder- 
stood and despised, He forwent the joys and bless- 
ings of home and friends, He climbed the steepest 
hill the world ever saw and He died to crown a 
program of racial love that appalled His enemies 
and drew a world to Him. 


THE MAN JESUS CHRIST 29 


Men must sanctify and direct that innate sense 
of responsibility for the race that lives in their sex 
qualities. We must seize that holy purpose of 
Jesus to leave nothing undone necessary to bring 
all men of every race into vital relations with God. 
We must do everything in our power to give men 
His viewpoint of the race as a subject of redemp- 
tion and impart to others His feeling for all men 
outside the pale of truth. This can be done when 
men, aS men, give adequate and God-ward expres- 
sion to their strong, masculine impulses. These 
yearnings of the heart toward the race must push 
men to the farthest horizon of human need. It is 
a spiritualized masculine urge to which Christian 
men must respond! 

There was an unmistakable aggressiveness about 
Jesus that belongs to men. It was a masculine 
mark that put Him fully and completely into the 
class of red-blooded, genuine manhood. He quali- 
fied on this point early. In fact, at twelve years 
of age, He began to break His own intellectual and 
spiritual pathway with a surprising freedom. It 
was an unprecedented line of conduct for a boy 
and wrought havoc with parental notions. But an 
unshackled Man of God was forming a life pro- 
gram. If we associate Jesus and His life with a 
soft, feeble, self-assertion that evades issues be- 
cause they make men uncomfortable, or with a 
character that preferred to talk in harmless gener- 
alities rather than direct and definite assertions 


30 THE MAN JESUS CHRIST 


that thrust like spear points into the enemies’ 
complacency, we are greatly mistaken. Jesus was 
a force, a vigorous, vital fact, a personality that 
won, a leader who led, a man who moved, a current 
that no one could turn. 

Roger Babson, who has set up a pulpit in every 
clearing-house and Board of Trade, in a commer- 
cial letter says: ‘‘ It makes me impatient to have 
people refer to Jesus as a ‘poor, wandering car- 
penter’s son.’ If you have any doubt as to Jesus’ 
ability to make money, if He had so desired, just 
read the story of His taking money from the fish’s 
mouth, the story of His multiplying the loaves of 
bread so as to feed five thousand, the story of His 
turning water into wine, or the story of His calling 
His disciples to cast their net on the other side of 
the ship. Any man who could so impress the 
people regarding material things could have be- 
come a great leader in finance, industry or politics. 
If Jesus were poor in worldly goods, it was not 
because He could not make a business success. 
Jesus recognized the fact that when one gets 
enough to eat and wear and a place to live, things 
then lose their value. He realized that the endur- 
ing pleasures of life come only from a development 
of man’s spiritual nature. For this reason, I am 
interested in presenting religion as a tangible asset 
for the man of affairs.” 

If there are men who have not hitherto given 
themselves to Christ’s cause, under the pre- 


THE MAN JESUS CHRIST 31 


judgment that there was something in it so ef- 
feminate as to make it non-compelling, let them 
once more face the full-length portrait of Jesus in 
the setting of the New Testament records. They 
have not seen Him. He is the most self-assertive 
personality the world ever saw. But His self- 
assertion never exceeded His ability or willing- 
ness to pay the price of the position He dared to 
assume. And it led Him sweating His very life- 
blood through the Garden of Gethsemane, and to 
the triumphant death on the Cross! 

Looking at this aggressive Man moving on 
toward duty, we are ready to respond to those 
familiar lines of Richard Watson Gilder: 


“Tf Jesus Christ is a man— 
And only a man—I say 
That of all mankind I cleave to Him, 
And to Him will I cleave alway.” 


We have a right to claim dogged persistency as 
a distinctly masculine quality. Not that there is 
not in women stability and adamantine character, 
but that men, by all that goes to make up the 
weight, bulk and momentum of their character, 
are noted for “ carrying on” with a stubborn, un- 
yielding front. There was nothing more conspic- 
uous in the make-up of Jesus than His persistency. 
His gentle face was rigid with iron purpose. No 
opposition ever turned His purpose. His own 
family lost heart, His fellow churchmen lost pa- 


32 THE MAN JESUS CHRIST 


tience, His disciples lost courage, His cause lost 
followers, His message lost weight and prestige, but 
on and on He went! Plotters plotted and unwise 
friends made sad mistakes, false friends wrought 
treachery, national leaders scorned His words, but 
on He went. There is a positive element of moral 
courage in His kind of persistency. There is the 
push of an indomitable moral motive, the call of 
an unreached vision that keeps Him moving on and 
on over impossible conditions. 

Beyond the horror and sickening memory of the 
carnage at Verdun, there is ever to be remembered 
the glory of a spectacle in which persistency gilded 
the sunset clouds of life for five hundred thousand 
patriots that went to death in defense of France. 
There is a moral impressiveness in that persistency 
that persisted for others that moves us to tears as 
we think of Verdun and the Argonne Forest, where 
750,000 of our own soldiers pushed on and on! 

Stubbornness may be hateful when behind it lie 
selfish purposes, but when transfigured by a spirit 
of love and self-abnegation, stubbornness becomes 
a sanctified passion without which the Kingdom 
lags. I hold that this special quality has been most 
completely exemplified in men and that Jesus puts 
premium on it. He had the iron of it in His own 
blood. He set His face and nothing turned it. 

Men must feel the call of such a personality. 
Men must feel the power in their lives, today, of 
this compelling trait of Jesus. Life for some men 


THE MAN JESUS CHRIST 33 


lacks ongoing persistency. They have lost a native 
masculine trait. They are not moving on. They 
shift positions; they make no Godward advance. 
Out of a soul that never wavered, from a heart 
that never quailed, Jesus calls to His brother-man, 
and says: “ Use all the masculine gifts I share with 
you; sanctify and harness your persistency to un- 
selfish aims, leave this indefinite non-committal 
living and dedicate, without reservation, your 
whole, indomitable self to God and man! ” 

There is another masculine trait in Jesus that 
we may call a tearless tenderness. I mean a quick 
sensitiveness before need, that chooses, rather, to 
organize a program of assistance, than to shed tears 
or talk sweetly about the situation. It is a com- 
bination of self-restraint and fine duplicity. Men 
will not cry. The masculine reserve that seeks to 
divert attention from any incipient outbreak of 
emotion, by the well-known devices of coughing, 
or the use of the handkerchief, is back of the trait 
I seek to describe. Dry-eyed without, but a boil- 
ing ocean of tears within, is the situation that men 
are familiar with. 

Can you think of Jesus looking at a group of 
blind men on the street whose sightless eyeballs are 
lifted toward Him and not feel a tide of tenderness 
sweep over Him? How near to tears He must have 
been when the polluted beggars stood afar off and 
cried: ‘‘ Jesus, have mercy on me.” What must 
the Greatheart of the race have felt as He looked 


34 THE MAN JESUS CHRIST 


at polluted womanhood and at the outcast lepers? 
His was a restrained and tearless tenderness that 
went at once to work! He wept, according to 
record, but once. Every tear a lense magnifying 
His human qualities. He worked incessantly to 
give expression to those unshed tears—just like 
a man. | 

What a wonderful example to follow! How 
compelling His personality and how irresistible His 
love! Every man to whom His Gospel has come 
ought to respond to this masculine program of 
Jesus. He was a man, He lived with men and He 
died for man! 





II 


THE CITY 


“The place where the Cross of Christ was planted was 
a strategic point. The Lord Jesus Christ set us this 
example when He bade His disciples begin at the 
metropolis.” ; 
“Calm soul of all things be it mine! 
To feel amidst the city’s jar, 
That there abides a peace of things 
Man did not make and cannot mar.” 
—MatTrHuEew ARNOLD. 


“The word of God came unto me, 
Sitting alone among the multitudes; 
And my blind eyes were touched with light 
And there was laid upon my lips a flame of fire.” 
—HELEN KELLER. 


“Soldiers of Christ 
For battle grow keen. 
Heaven-sent winds 
Haunt alley and lane. 
Singing of life 
In town meadows green 
After the toil 
And battle and pain.” 
—VACHEL LINDSAY. 


III 
THE CITY 


“And the city lieth foursquare, and the length ts as 
large as the breadth: and he measured the city with the 
reed, twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the 
breadth and the height of it are equal.” 

—REVELATION 21: 16. 


ext) absorbed was John in the life and 
<5) character and possibilities of the city, 
S&S) \@ so familiar with its dominant aspects, 
. “2 architecturally and otherwise, that 
when he dreamed of heaven it took on the features 
of a glorified earthly city with foundations of jas- 
per, walls of amethyst and gates of pearl. There 
never was more sin nor more human sorrow in the 
world than was concentrated in the cities of John’s 
day. But the intuitions of this old city-lover re- 
vealed to him the spiritual possibilities wrapped up 
in a great, populous city so clearly that in spite 
of all the things that marred its beauty, the city 
prefigured for him heaven itself. This required 
a keen perception and an ability to discriminate 
between things as they appear and things as they 
are to be. 
With this vision of John in mind let us empha- 


37 





38 THE CITY 


size the creative and inspiring character of a great 
city, noting how its foundations are laid and safe- 
guarded. Then, I hope, the case having been 
stated, everyone will be able to locate his personal 
responsibility in the matter of organizing and main- 
taining the forces that can and will make the 
modern city a redemptive agency in the social, 
economic and spiritual world. 

We should talk more about the creative and 
inspiring character of a great city. The honest, 
constructive critic of the social order is always un- 
popular, but his is an important task. Any man 
who allows a false pride in his city to blind his eyes 
to sordid facts or to dull his soul to the shocking 
phases of a city’s life, or to convince him that be- 
cause there is external beauty and prosperity there 
can be no internal corruption and no deadly evil 
working in the life of that city, is a false friend and 
his leadership in public life is a menace. 

The time has come when intelligent, forward- 
looking men and women who are working and 
praying for better things, should recognize the 
creative and redemptive influences touching human 
life and character as they live and move in a great 
city. We have never been quite balanced in our 
judgment on this point. We have incessantly be- 
moaned the dark, discouraging phases of city life. 
Many writers, when discussing the moral life of 
our American cities, have considered the fittest 
descriptive at their disposal the historic synonym 


THE CITY 39 


for total civic depravity,—“ Sodom.” A reference 
being to a civic situation so utterly hopeless that it 
had to be cured by fire and brimstone. There were 
not even ten godly men, according to the divine 
census, in the rotten town who were available for 
any kind of spiritual leadership when the crisis 
came. The soul of Sodom was dead. It fell to a 
moral ruin which brought on its physical destruc- 
tion. Walking over its site, one sees, today, bleak 
desolation and a wilderness of death. 

But Sodom is not the word to be used to describe 
our modern city. Social writers, trying to arouse 
indifferent people, call the city a “ festering sore 
on the body politic.” They mean to say it is a 
loathsome, dangerous thing, a symptom of a sick 
body. An eruption that taints and annoys. Re- 
formers have called the city the plague spot of our 
democracy, holding that in the city, as in a hot-bed, 
are bred all the political and economic heresies and 
all the wild theories of the social and political 
order. They have the statistics to prove that in 
the city crime is nourished, anarchy is sheltered 
and everything that disintegrates and destroys has 
its home. Of course, every known phase of human 
depravity, in all its lurid forms, flourishes in the 
dark purlieus of the city. Every vagary that the 
restless mind and bitter heart of man devises is 
here. We shall, of course, take this for granted; 
why not take something else for granted? 

Nothing is more depressing to the spirit of young 


4.0 THE CITY 


leadership waiting to be called to service, than 
these utterly hopeless, one-sided, and inadequate 
conceptions of city life. We may never be able to 
take Sodom from the front page. No one would 
desire to minimize the fact of sin and moral degen- 
eracy, crime and lawlessness that mar the peace 
and joy of the great groups of our fellow-men liv- 
ing together in the modern city. After twenty 
years of intimate experience in the heart of a great 
American city, I bear testimony to the fact that 
there is another and a really glorious side. Only 
in the atmosphere of hope and assurance based on 
the facts that cheer and on figures that encourage 
and on good men and movements as sacrificially 
they serve in a great city’s higher life, can we build 
a platform of redemptive principle and call to its 
promotion a leadership that will make John’s 
dream of the holy city come true. ‘There was 
enough spiritual indifference in the city to make 
Jesus weep as He approached it, but we know as 
well that in that city He found the human elements 
out of which He organized Pentecost and a spiritual 
movement that transformed the face of human 
society and wrote a new chapter in human his- 
tory. These things must be proclaimed on the 
housetop by honest men while the cynic, the social 
pessimist and the bitter radical are filling the air 
with their gloomy pictures of modern city life. 
There are certain conclusions about the city that 
we all accept. They compel our appreciation of 


THE CITY 41 


the city as a great, unescapable human factor. We 
must figure definitely on the city as an ally if we 
plan to save the world. 

First: The city is an economic necessity. Cen- 
tralization of human life began as an economic and 
protective measure. Men found they could live 
better and more safely by living closer together. 

With all our intricate and complex ways of 
modern living and doing business, the city becomes 
more and more an economic necessity. We more 
and more need segregation in groups to get things 
done. It is well-nigh true that when you put people 
together their potential is in proportion to their 
numbers. Nature puts our nerves into compact, 
knotty ganglia, a magnificent instance of co- 
operation in the mass, out of which she develops 
the force with which she drives our physical ma- 
chinery. The cities are the nerve ganglia of mod- 
ern civilization. In spite of the airplane, the radio, 
the swift and easy contacts, the wiping out of 
space, the economical necessity of the city, as such, 
grows more apparent. For trade and commerce, 
for collecting and distributing what we eat or wear, 
for buying and selling, the city as we have it is a 
necessity. It always has been, it always will be. 
No matter what the idealist with easy formulas for 
human helping may say. The city is an economic 
necessity. 

Second: The city is a social privilege. Its lure 
to lonely country boys and girls we all can under- 


42 THE CITY 


stand. It brings them to the city in endless pro- 
cessions. ‘They see its lights and love its vast 
moving crowds. They feel the touch of its gay 
life as it goes by in the limousines or is visible 
through windows of aristocratic hotels and clubs. 
Human contacts-are at close range. There are 
congenial groups available. There are privileges 
made possible in the great social co-operation of a 
city that become the goals for which thousands 
strive. There are doors of welcome that every- 
where swing wide to people in a city, opening into 
magic corridors where people talk and play and 
sing and paint and dance and taste the joys of 
social contact. On every hand are efforts to satisfy 
a deep, insatiable human craving. This is not an 
expression of anything regrettable or degraded in 
human life, but the revelation of a divine gift of 
fellowship and a love of brotherhood on which we 
must be wise enough to build the holy city. We 
must not let the social instincts of man that have 
pulled the city together pull the city apart, but be 
the means of lifting it. 

Third: The city is an intellectual stimulus. It 
releases forces into life to which men respond and, 
responding, find their intellectual experiences en- 
riched and expanded. When the street-car men 
went from the task of driving the old horse-cars to 
the cable-cars, they took perforce an intellectual 
step up. Then when the clumsy cable gave way 
before the majestic power of electricity, the old 


THE CITY 43 


horse-car driver became a fellow craftsman with 
Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison. They 
added to the circumference of their brains another 
intellectual ring. In a thousand ways unseen, in- 
audible, compelling, persistent, the city and its life 
is working to stimulate the intellectual life of her 
people long before we began to talk of its schools 
and colleges and art galleries and orchestras and lit- 
erary clubs. It is an irresistible intellectual tonic. 

Fourth: The city is a breath-taking communal 
achievement. It does things in a communal way 
that rival the accomplishments of empires. When 
a city feels the urge of a civic ideal she has a co- 
operative power at her disposal that makes mir- 
acles easy. The unparalleled wonder in the realm 
of civic improvements in a modern city is the de- 
velopment of the Lake Front under the Chicago 
Plan Commission. This gigantic enterprise in com- 
munity co-operation on behalf of beauty, health 
and happiness typifies the possibilities in communal 
co-operation in all directions, when honest leader- 
ship led by ideals and backed by an intelligent and 
generous popular support, takes its place in a 
great city. 

These are features of city life that compel our 
admiration and advise us of potential things. 
There are in the city great dormant gifts, fine ca- 
pacities, splendid resources that all our men and 
women moving on higher levels of leadership must 
seek to capitalize for God and the general good. 


44 THE CITY 


American people are apt to capitalize all of these 
inspiring city factors for mere money-making or 
selfish living. They do not see and understand the 
spiritual potential of these things that are inherent 
in the life of a great city. These things quicken 
civic pride and at the same time dull our con- 
sciences. True civic greatness goes with power and 
enthusiasm in nourishing those substantial and 
abiding realities of life for which all money-making 
really exists. 

We recall that the foundations of John’s Holy 
City were four-square. A city’s greatness cannot 
be built on her market triumphs, nor on her manu- 
facturing output, nor on her industrial, mercantile 
or transportation supremacy. ‘These things may 
make a city big, but they cannot make it great. 
Contractors who build skyscrapers must put foun- 
dations under them capable of bearing the weight 
of mighty towers. They know better than to trust 
to surface sands. They drive their caissons to the 
limestone strata far below and pour in the cement 
that makes in forty hours what would take nature 
forty million years to duplicate! Then with their 
footings on the everlasting rocks, they go sky- 
ward with confidence, setting lines of architectural 
beauty that charm the world. They lift towers and 
domes and columns and arches competent to re- 
ceive splendid doorways, mullioned windows and 
corridors of marble. The invisible essential things 
without which there would be nothing, are the hid- 


THE CITY 45 


den footings far below, where on the primal rock 
of God’s creation, stability and strength are guar- 
anteed. What footings can we locate for the noble 
city of tomorrow? 

First: A competent unselfish leadership in public 
affairs. Two qualifying words standing here to- 
gether will solve the civic problems of America so 
far as they can be solved in a wor!d where a total 
solution is never to be expected. When a city will 
train up, in her homes and schools, a generation of 
competent and unselfish leaders who will go to civic 
life and service as they go to the army or the navy 
or the post-office or the diplomatic service, in order 
to give as potential citizens their best to the service 
of the city, then effective government will be pos- 
sible. Two things have ruined municipal govern- 
ment in America: incompetency and selfish greed. 
The record of failure in our city governments, in 
our otherwise wonderful nation, brings a blush to 
our cheeks. Men who are accustomed to great re- 
sponsibilities in business, citizens whose motives 
are high and whose characters are above reproach, 
have, through the years, steadily refused to accept 
leadership in the politics of our American cities. 
They have turned from the duty and left it to men 
who: traded on it as a business and who prostituted 
for gain the sacred privileges of public office. Until 
good men and women in the precincts, wards and 
districts of our cities become so sensitive to their 
patriotic obligations that they will rise up to take 


46 THE CITY 


their share in leadership and pay the price in 
service, we may expect to find disreputable ward 
heelers and grafting individuals marring the gov- 
ernment and ruining the ideals of civic life and 
character. The times demand on behalf of the 
better life of the city the willing, competent, lead- 
ership of good men. 

The second footing for the foundation of a great 
city is a rising level of upright public opinion, as 
expressed in a clean, honest press. The reading 
masses are aS sensitive as mercury. The headlines 
of a morning or evening paper colour the feelings, 
affect the temper and shape the program of a whole 
city. What people read today in the daily press is 
a more influential factor than anything that touches 
a city’s life. A column of news can be so written 
as to poison the life of a city, irrespective of the 
character of the news. A paper can let loose ugly 
feelings in a crowd more effectively than any soap- 
box orator. 

It can throw out a false alarm and start a mental 
panic with ten lines of nonpareil that a column of 
editorial matter cannot correct. The city papers, 
today, are the greatest intellectual apparatus for 
reaching the mind and moving the motives of the 
masses that civilization has. The papers can kill 
or cure. They can set up or tear down. No city is 
safe unless it knows that this marvellous fountain 
of information and influence is organized to pour 
forth waters that are sweet and clean. This does 


THE CITY 47 


not mean that censorship should tamper with news 
matter, nor that the columns of the newspaper 
should be closed against news that shock the sensi- 
bilities and taint the memory of the public. It 
would be moral suicide for a city to repress the 
horrible or cover up the sickening tragedies that 
warn men of the fatalities of sin. But no city is 
safe unless it feels sure that those who own great 
city dailies are above the bribe of money or false, 
cheap popularity. A city is fortunate if it has 
papers that are dominated by high ideals and clean 
purposes. A city is thrice blessed if its papers are 
willing to take leadership in all active measures 
that seek to solidify the moral foundations of the 
community. 

There are such great dailies and such newspaper 
proprietors. I know an owner of a dozen great 
American dailies. He represents always positive 
and courageous newspaper leadership in every 
public issue where moral principles are involved. 
He considers the New Testament good copy. He 
is not afraid to spread a sermon on his editorial 
page. Back of all that is written the public knows 
there are fixed moral standards that shape all 
policies and govern all the utterances of his papers. 
There is no help in building the foundations of a 
great city from newspapers that are cynical toward 
all good. Those that burlesque all moral reforms 
and encourage every kind of lawlessness by inviting 
disobedience of particular laws are a menace to 


48 THE CITY 


good order. No class of men have more solemn 
responsibility resting upon them in the matter of 
making a city than our newspaper owners and 
editors. They can be the very corner-stones of 
stability and progress or they can be the fatal in- 
fluences that undermine and disintegrate the very 
fabric of a city’s true greatness. 

Third: The third footing for the foundations of 
a great city is to be found in the existence of a 
creative group of institutions founded by the 
people and for the people in the service of altru- 
ism, philanthropy and art. 

These, in fact, are the effects and not the cause 
of greatness. ‘There must be a certain richness in 
the soil of a city’s life before these things can spring 
up. I have sat on a hospital board for many years 
with busy, burdened city men. When I think of 
the four hundred and seventy-five broken in body 
lying at this moment in the clean, white beds of a 
great hospital made possible by the gifts of gener- 
ous people, when I think of one hundred other hos- 
pitals and dispensaries in the same city with an 
army of physicians, surgeons and nurses, when I 
think of homes for our incurables where death, like 
a ball and chain, is tied to every guest, when I go 
into the homes for aged people, when I hear the 
cry of motherless children in the memorial orphan- 
ages and listen to happy voices singing Christmas 
carols in the blue-smocked crowd of little children 
in the homes for the friendless, and when I know 


THE CITY 49 


that these are typical institutions of which there 
are many glorifying the unselfish and generous life 
of city men and women—then I know there is a 
subsoil of love out of which true civic greatness 
may grow. When these flowers of deep human 
iove have bloomed so generously in the life of a 
city, we are not surprised to know that other things 
are happening that are sure passports to civic 
greatness. 

One is not surprised to learn that when, years 
ago, the dream of Theodore Thomas for a great 
symphony orchestra was about to dissolve through 
financial difficulties that 8,850 people came for- 
ward with contributions and made the Chicago 
Symphony Orchestra one of the permanent insti- 
tutions in the higher life of that city. Art Galleries 
are a flower native to the soil of civic unselfishness. 
What a glory rests upon the names of founders and 
benefactors of those serving institutions that are 
lifting rich and poor out of the drab monotony of 
today into a world of beauty and spiritual reality 
cheering them on their way. In the unfolding pur- 
poses of human service there is a sure pathway 
leading on to genuine civic greatness. 

There is a fourth footing for the foundation of 
greatness of a city. A genuine, vital church life 
well sustained, pouring into the total life of the city 
a steady stream of spiritual power and holding high 
amidst the stress of commercial life the ideals of 
Jesus, is a supreme requisite for permanent great- 


50 THE CITY 


ness of any city. I am above prejudice in my opin- 
ion on this subject. This is not the voice of 
sectarianism. This is not saying that the Kingdom 
of God includes only and exclusively members of 
the Church. It is not a claim that all moral mo- 
tives originate in and all moral goals issue from the 
Church. It is to say that no group of people can 
achieve permanent greatness unless there be kept 
fresh and outflowing, like perennial streams that 
gladden the land, these fountains of spirituality 
called churches. There is nothing in human soci- 
ety doing the work they do. There is nothing pre- 
pared in spirit and program to do the work they do. 
Humanity, with all its sins and sorrows, with its 
moral defects and delinquencies, waits for the heal- 
ing and help of its gentle hands. Men find here the 
kind of help they get nowhere else. I have been at 
the bedside of too many dying men in the great 
city and heard the last whispered prayer of too 
many pilgrims of the night, as they set forth to the 
land of eternal day, to have anyone tell me there is 
a satisfying substitute for the Church of Christ 
and its message of hope and immortality. Fra- 
ternity is a glorious virtue and life would be gloomy 
without it, but it has not a remedy in itself for the 
sore conscience, no cleansing prescription for the 
taint in a soul, no balm of healing for the broken 
heart. 

Civic virtues die when churches die. Morals 
and ethics pass when religious centres let the fire 


THE CITY 51 


on their altars grow cold. Patriotism lives in men’s 
hearts close by religion. Good order comes from 
our keeping the house of God in order. What a 
responsibility for making a city great! It rests 
here and now upon church people. Some citizens 
of the city have turned their backs upon the 
Church. This, they cannot afford to do; they have 
broken faith with Him who wept over the city, and 
they pay no heed to His Church! Then they won- 
der why their high school boys and girls go wrong? 
Why young men take money that does not belong 
to them? Why lawless people flaunt the constitu- 
tion of the United States? Unless citizens of the 
city do their part to keep fresh and outflowing 
these God-given fountains of religion, our democ- 
racy is doomed. We must build the moral char- 
acter of the generation in order to build the city 
and the state and the nation on lines that are noble 
and great and with a character that will abide. 
There is something in the city that calls to the 
best in us and we must respond. We hear that 
something above the din and clamour of its 
markets. | 


“Where cross the crowded ways of life, 
Where sound the cries of race and clan, 
Above the noise of selfish strife 
We hear Thy voice, O Son of Man.” 


ar 


4 
Named 
ee, | yo 





IV 


PLUS AND MINUS 


“Ts thy cruse of comfort fatling? 
Rise and share it with another; 
And through all the years of famine 
It shall serve thee and thy brother. 


“For the heart grows rich in giving— 
All tts wealth 1s living gain; 
Seeds which mildew in the garner, 
Scattered, fill with gold the plain.” 
—SELECTED. 


“The holy Supper is kept, indeed, 
In whatso we share with another’s need: 
Not what we give, but what we share, 
For the gift without the giver is bare; 
Who gives himself with his alms feeds three; 
Himself, his hungering neighbour and Me.” 
—LOowELL. 


IV 
PLUS AND MINUS 


“But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His right- 
eousness; and all these things shall be added. unto 
you. ’—MATTHEW 6: 33. 


“Take, therefore, the talent from him, and give it 
unto him which hath ten talents.’—MAatTTHEW 25: 28. 


WRHE help of two algebraic signs is here 
cry is, being invoked! It will be necessary to 
4 re take them entirely out of the realm of 
Kis) b= mathematics, where they belong, and to 
use them as parables in the realm of spiritual 
things. Most men are more at home discussing 
the spiritual side of mathematical things than with 
the mystifying, perplexing side that always baffled 
them in the classroom. 

The spiritual uses of the plus and minus signs 
need comment. 

We need but little algebra to understand the 
special significance of these signs when set before 
figures. It makes all the difference in the world as 
to the part a figure plays in a group of figures 
whether or not it has before it the plus or the minus 
sign! If it be a plus sign, you have an accumu- 
lator at work in the group, a constructive, building 


55 





56 PLUS AND MINUS 


influence. You have something working for an 
aggregate by adding numerical quantities. It isa 
signal for tying things together and merging differ- 
ent and differing quantities into bigger and better 
unities. The minus sign is as obvious and as 
effective in getting _results as the plus, but how 
different the results! Set the minus sign before a 
figure and disintegration and diminution start at 
once. Things begin to dissolve and disappear 
wherever that figure with its minus prefix appears. 
Turn loose in the society of figures a numeral with 
the minus sign prefixed and the cutting down and 
taking away process starts that whole group toward 
nothing. ‘The minus sign, when its work is done, 
has reduced everything it touches. It takes away 
just as effectively as the plus can add. 

There are certain moral equivalents to the plus 
and minus signs working in our lives. There are 
principles that affect our lives and characters as 
plus and minus affect the figures in the algebraic 
formula. Ascertain what is the co-efficient sign 
before a figure and you will know whether it is 
going to build up or tear down. And nothing will 
alter or obscure or nullify the mathematical in- 
fluence of that numeral as long as it lives and wears 
the sign. Bury it deep as you will in a vast ava- 
lanche of figures whose totals are breath-taking 
and in it all and under it all is the “ plussing ” or 
“‘ minusing.”’ 

Every man or woman in that great group-life we 


PLUS AND MINUS 57 


call human society wears a plus or a minus sign. 
They exhibit the character, work the results, exert 
the influence in society of these algebraic prefixes. 
God bless and strengthen the influence of the man 
who isa plus! Who touches life with constructive 
power and going everywhere always adds to and 
never takes away. God save us from the disinte- 
grating work of minus men who, like the sign, take 
away and tear down, who reduce and destroy. 

Is there in our spiritual life a moral equivalent 
to the plus sign? “Seek ye first the kingdom of 
God and his righteousness and all these things shall 
be added” (Matt. 6: 33). 

Here is the plus principle in daily living. With 
the kingdom of God in the heart, the plus process 
begins in life. When the kingdom of God within 
is recognized, men achieve the quality of life that 
brings to bear on all things and everybody, the plus 
influences! They become constructive factors in 
the social order—organizing, unifying, building. 
With their dominant purpose in being and doing, 
shaped by the principles of the kingdom, men be- 
come to human society what the plus sign is in the 
algebraic formula. 

The text suggests that it is the man with a pas- 
sion for the kingdom of God and God’s right and 
just way of living, that becomes the supplementing 
prefix in human society. This is not the first mean- 
ing of the text of the Great Teacher. He was 
telling men how to find rest and equanimity. But 


58 PLUS AND MINUS 


the other lesson is plainly there! Men that get 
the vision of a better world, seeing what Jesus saw, 
and earnestly go toward His goals with something 
of the yearning of His heart and indomitable pur- 
pose, are always the constructive, upbuilding, in- 
spiring factors in the world. They add. They 
make for totals and a great oneness. They work 
toward unity and solidarity. Their goal is brother- 
hood. Whether their influence be limited to a 
church or a community or a nation or a world, the 
plus effect of their living is the same. In the plus 
principle we find the thing for which we are look- 
ing. We need people who can hold things together 
and make their lives and their personalities con- 
structive and saving influences. 

Joshua B. Garrett taught Greek in Hanover Col- 
lege for more than sixty years. He loved Greek 
and knew it as one knows his mother tongue. He 
loved the classroom and the art of teaching. But 
above all he was one of the few men of my youth 
that I felt thought supremely of the kingdom of 
God and His righteousness. He became a plus in 
every boy’s life for the sixty years he taught. Hun- 
dreds of men all over the world in useful occupa- 
tions testify today to the upbuilding and solidifying 
influences that were set to work in their lives 
through the life of this beloved teacher of Greek 
who was a passionate lover of the kingdom of God 
and its righteousness. 

Frances Willard was a plus power that has 


PLUS AND MINUS 59 


wrought, for forty years, in American society and 
around the world. She has done more to change 
the moral tastes of people and set into life temper- 
ance ideals than perhaps any other personality. 
She had a passion for the kingdom of God; it took 
her outside of the comforts of her church and the 
home and into the purlieus of sin and set against 
her the virulent opposition of wicked men. The 
same was true of Booker T. Washington, and Dr. 
Packard of Persia, and scores of other men and 
women in our own country and across the world 
who are today seeking supremely the kingdom of 
God! Loving God and His kingdom, supremely 
seeking it by every impulse and program possible, 
you become a plus influence in life. God will add 
to your joy and peace while you add to the peace 
and power of others. 

But what about making unfavourable use of the 
minus sign? Is this innocent sign a symbol of 
moral weakness? ‘There is a moral equivalent of 
the minus sign that opposes the moral equivalent 
of the plus sign. 

“ Take, therefore, the talent from him” (Matt. 
Ries ys 

The minus principle in the moral world is the 
thing that subtracts and diminishes. It is exhibited 
at work in the parable of the talents from which 
the second text is taken! The plus men in the 
parable were honoured with public plaudits. They 
added to the trust funds in hand by faithfulness 


aa 


60 PLUS AND MINUS 


and judicious investment. ‘The selfish inert man 
who thought so much of his own comfort and ease 
that he chose to take no chance, was a minus sign 
in the day of reckoning. He always has been and 
always will be! Selfishness is the moral equivalent 
to the minus sign in any man’s life! Do you know 
one single monument selfishness has ever erected? 
A selfish man, wherever he is, whatever he does, 
like the figure with a minus prefix in a welter of 
figures, is slowly at work undermining the founda- 
tion of society. He always works on the minus 
side, subtracting and taking away! 

What is the matter with so many of the peace 
diplomats and conference leaders that sit at world 
councils? What is the matter with the little na- 
tions of Eastern Europe? Many a leader at these 
so-called peace tables is branded with the minus 
sign on his heart. The futile deliberations and the 
economic and political calamities that have fol- 
lowed these conferences are due to the baleful in- 
fluence of that minus sign working in the lives of 
selfish nations. They seek to take away and not to 
build up. They wish to get but not to give. And 
if their greed be not modified by a mutuality born 
of a sense of interdependence they will break into 
fragments the solidarity of Europe. 

What has been the matter with certain men in 
business who have lost their place of leadership in 
business and their standing in society? Selfishness 
placed the minus sign before their lives and in the 


PLUS AND MINUS 61 


working of the program of the minus sign, self- 
destruction followed! Pity those prosperous men 
whose lives have crumpled up and failed because 
they did the bidding of the wrong sign! 

In this problem of the signs at work in human 
life, is there any solution? Yes! 

Jesus reversed the minus sign and made it an 
active plus sign. He changed its whole content, 
character, and practical consequence. He stopped 
its subtracting power and started it adding. He 
took the facts of human experience and contra- 
dicted all the laws of mathematics when He said, 
“ He that saveth his life shall lose it, and he that 
loseth his life for my sake and the gospel, shall find 
it’? (Matt. 16:25). Thus the minus sign may 
become a plus. 

The selfish heart, a subtracting and diminishing 
influence, becomes a plus power when it is pos- 
sessed by that unselfishness that took Christ 
through life, sacrificing, deducting, foregoing for 
others, coming in a supreme act of self-abnegation 
to the Cross. Greed dies in men’s life when once 
and truly they see that Cross and know its mean- 
ing! Our minus lives may be changed and glori- 
fied into the plus! There is to be no saving of the 
world, no stability of the social order, no progress 
in government, no prosperity in business till we can 
drive out the minus influences of greed and selfish- 
ness that pervert and unspiritualize men’s lives 
and destroy that unity and solidarity of life by 


62 PLUS AND MINUS 


which alone progress is to be found. Jesus was the 
world’s supreme plus sign. Unknowing men that 
never saw anything they could call gain outside of 
their ledgers or beyond their thrones or above their 
armies, thought Him and His plan all minus. They 
scorned His teaching, ridiculed His ideals and 
crucified Him on a cross, and said, “‘ the plus abides 
with spears and crowns and golden palaces.” But 
all their empires fell apart and their military power 
melted away. The names of their great ones are 
simply symbols of presumption and futility and 
bitter disillusionment, while His Name is the Name 
above every name. When His love fills our hearts, 
then are altered the subtracting and belittling 
things that work to hurt and hinder the world. 
Then we know the thing that brings joy and power 
into life and the thing that enriches and sustains. 
We need in everything the proper prefix to our 
living that our character in all things may be 
constructive and upbuilding. 


V 


COMRADES OF THE 
SHINING PLATEAU 


“O Master, let me walk with thee 
In lowly paths of service free; 
Tell me thy secret, help me bear 
The strain of toil, the fret of care. 
* * * * 


Teach me thy patience! Still with thee 

In closer, dearer company; 

In work that keeps faith sweet and strong, 

In trust that triumphs over wrong.” 
—WASHINGTON GLADDEN. 


“What happy secret fountain, 
Fair shade or mountain, 
Whose undiscovered virgin glory 
Boasts it this day, though not in story. 
Was then thy dwelling? Did some cloud 
Fix’d to a tent, descend and shroud 
My distrest Lord? Or did a star, 
Beckoned by Thee, though high and far, 
In sparkling smiles haste gladly down 
To lodge light and increase her own? 
My dear, dear God! I do not know 
What lodged thee then, nor where, nor how: 
But I am sure thou now dost come 
Oft to a narrow homely room, 
Where thou, too, hast but the least part, 
My God, I mean my sinful heart.” 
—HeEnry VAUGHAN, 


V 
COMRADES OF THE SHINING PLATEAU 


“And after six days, Jesus taketh with him Peter, and 
James, and John, and leadeth them up into an high moun- 
tain apart by themselves; and he was transfigured before 
them. . . . And there was a cloud that overshadowed 
them: and a voice came out of the cloud, saying, This is 
my beloved Son: hear him.’—Mark 9: 2-7. 


“ And one of the multitude answered and said, Master, 
I have brought unto thee my son, which hath a dumb 
spirit; and wheresoever he taketh him, he teareth him: 
and he foameth, and gnasheth with his teeth, and pineth 
away: and I spake to thy disciples that they should cast 
him out; and they could not.”—Mark 9: 17-18. 


AERE is a story in two parts. The first 
VEN | part has to do with a glorious spiritual 
) experience on the mountain-top. The 
¢ 44a7 49 second part has to do with the sad 
failure of men to make proper use of that spiritual 
experience for the use of needy suffering fellows in 
the valley. The first part reveals the privileges 
that belong to discipleship when it detaches itself 
from earthly things and enters into divine com- 
radeship with Jesus. The second part reveals the 
deficient understanding and ineffective faith that 
make for the failure of those who have been on the 
mountain-top. The first part shows how this drab, 


65 





66 COMRADES OF THE SHINING PLATEAU 


everyday living of ours may be saturated with spi- 
ritual joys and divine contentment when its fellow- 
ship is on the supreme levels and with heavenly 
company. The second part shows how the ecstasy 
and spiritual exaltation of the mountain-top may 
ooze and fail of practical help in the presence of 
emergencies when human forgetfulness and selfish 
spirit have done their work. 

Let us first go to the mountain-top. Here all is 
radiant and full of peace and joy. The “ mountain- 
top’? is a metaphorical phrase for happy spiritual 
experience; for the glad, deep reactions of religion 
in the heart. We think of the mountain-top as a 
level on which certain glorious realities of our 
religious life are set in the clearest possible atmos- 
phere. Here the visibility is fine. Spiritual reali- 
ties are so vivid that they are indisputable and 
reassuring as we see them in the clear, brilliant air 
of the lofty altitude. Looking toward the great 
things of God and the spirit life we say with new 
emphasis, “‘ Now I see! I know! I feel! I am 
convinced! My doubts are gone! My faith is 
tuned again and religion seems definite and worth- 
while! ” All this is true because we are on the 
clear, high levels. We have risen above the fogs 
of the low-lying valleys. 

It must be acknowledged that there are some 
realities of religion that Christ’s own disciples do 
not see because of the machinery and the appa- 
ratus, the programs and organization technique 


COMRADES OF THE SHINING PLATEAU 67 


they insist on taking into the mountain-top. They 
are anxious to be efficient. They so earnestly de- 
sire to see the good expand that they clutter up the 
mountain-top with headquarters’ paraphernalia. 
There are so many practical outfits and so much 
general equipment and agency material for doing 
things that we obscure the transfigured faces of 
our Lord and His heavenly companions and drown 
the voices of the mountain-top conferees by our 
machinery. We are so busy and noisy, hurrying 
about and giving orders as to the little transitory 
human booths that must, in our opinion, be set up, 
that the great voice of God Himself, with a mes- 
sage that would melt the world into oneness in 
Him, falls dead upon our ears. 

Look athwart that shining plateau at this mo- 
ment. At this high level spiritual vision is clear. 
All anxiety as to machinery is for the moment 
profane and futile. One must here detach himself 
from the buzzing order of the day. Closing one’s 
ears to controversies and debate, let us take the 
rewards of the glorious sunlit quietude of the 
mountain-top. What is it that there is visible? 

Jesus! His face aglow with a divine light that 
is the badge of His ineffable divinity. Divine per- 
sonality overlays those human features with such 
a glory as eyes have never seen. What a sight for 
timid, half-believing disciples! What an unveiling 
of infinite purposes! What do we need to see more 
truly than this shining face? We have nearly lost 


68 COMRADES OF THE SHINING PLATEAU 


sight of Jesus in the trappings of the organizations 
we have set up to do Him honour. We have had 
our gaze turned from the simple, glorious character 
of Jesus toward definitions and descriptions and 
deductions about Jesus. We have argued and 
philosophized and_ exhorted, when what we need 
is simply to look directly and uninterruptedly at 
Jesus. 


“No fable old, nor mythic lore, 
Nor dream of bards and seers, 
No dead fact stranded on the shore 
Of the oblivious years. 


“ But warm, sweet, tender, even yet 
A present help is He: 
And faith has still its Olivet, 
And love its Galilee.” 


Spiritual companionship! Something a chilly 
world does not afford. Many people are lonely for 
spiritual companionship but do not know what the 
trouble is. They purposely distract their minds by 
all kinds of activities. The pain of unrest spoils 
their good purposes, and the heart knows no rest. 
The fellowship on the mountain-top is the supreme 
corrective for worldly loneliness and for that rest- 
lessness that disturbs our jaded souls. On that 
mountain-top there proceeded a conversation that 
dealt with the eternal purposes of God and their 
human connections in time. The vocabulary and 
whole personal intercourse of those heavenly con- 


COMRADES OF THE SHINING PLATEAU 69 


versationalists was saturated with spirituality and 
divine grace and a great tidal wave of peace from 
the undisturbed sea of eternity rolled over that 
mountain-top. When we talk of fleeting, trivial, 
earthly things exclusively, preventing the consider- 
ation of great themes of God and the serious pur- 
poses of immortal living, a loneliness like some 
spiritual blight falls upon us. We need mountain- 
top comradeship and conversation to keep us glad 
and going Godward in our thoughts and life work. 

Confirmation of faith as an active process was 
being realized on that mountain-top. Those human 
comrades of the shining plateau took doubts and 
spiritual deficits with them into this interview. 
They were slow in concluding about the great 
features of Christ’s character and mission. He did 
not altogether look the part of the Messianic hero 
they had pictured. He made small pretensions. 
His ideal was in opposition to an imperialistic res- 
toration of David’s throne. His chief intimacies 
were with common ordinary people and He met 
violent hostilities from the rich and great. ‘These 
seekers after truth who are to lead the cause of 
Christ need confirmation of their faith. They need 
convictions that are rooted. They want certitude 
laid on foundations of faith that cannot be shaken 
by the storms that are coming. They must be 
rock-ribbed and ironbound lest they wreck the 
faith about to be delivered to them for the Church 
of the centuries! 


70 COMRADES OF THE SHINING PLATEAU 


It was the spiritual experience of the mountain- 
top they were waiting for. Nothing renews the 
footings of faith under men in a world of doubt and 
uncertainty like finding the levels where vision is 
clear and the voice of God is audible. Alone with 
Him in the shining clouds of heavenly fellowship, 
where the conversations run on great themes and 
where the comrades are men of the ages and the 
glow of spirituality falls over all like the golden 
cloud that covers God’s throne—this is the 
mountain-top seclusion weary men need. Abide 
- there for a season, and when you walk down there 
will be arguments written in your heart against 
which the gates of hell cannot prevail. We need 
these mountain-top experiences that stamp indel- 
ible impressions upon our souls. We need them 
more than intellectual arguments or coercive exhor- 
tations that convince but do not convert nor hold us 
when the sound of earnest speaking has died away. 

On the mountain with Jesus and a spiritual com- 
panionship and a great voice of reassurance and 
confirmation, is where discipleship gets its power. 
Here is where, and this is how, the intellect is set 
on fire, the soul is charged with pentecostal energy 
till it becomes as a spiritual dynamo thrilling every- 
thing that makes contact with it. Congregations 
and church officers should take to the shining 
plateau. They have much to do, but all haste, 
waste and hurry is a halting and hindering of God’s 
work if there be not first a very definite dwelling 


COMRADES OF THE SHINING PLATEAU 71 


on the mountain-top with its divine companions 
and conversation. 

It is to be regretted that there is a second part to 
the picture. These mountain-top disciples must go 
down. Some rare souls seem not to realize this. 
They live on the high levels of spiritual peace and 
joy. They let nothing interfere with their pro- 
longed rest in the Lord! They love to sit at His 
feet. They love the sunshine of His face and linger 
in it, come what will, call what may. Rudyard 
Kipling has such disciples in mind when he draws a 
contrast between the sons of Mary and of Martha. 


“And the Sons of Mary smile and are bless¢d— 

they know the angels are on their side. 

They know in them is the Grace confessed, and 
for them are the Mercies multiplied, 

They sit at the Feet—they hear the Word—they 
see how truly the Promise runs; 

They have cast their burden upon the Lord, and 
—the Lord He lays it on Martha’s Sons!” 


The disciples of the shining plateau went down. 
There was at the foot of the mountain a distressed 
father with a sick child waiting to be helped. The 
transcendent scenes have shifted—this is life. The 
incident seems so disturbing in contrast with the 
lovely quietude of the mount. Why does the father 
make a public matter of his family affliction? Why 
bring a note of melancholy and discord into the 
harmony of the beautiful comradeship, the memory 
of which is yet fresh and sweet? Does not he know 


72 COMRADES OF THE SHINING PLATEAU 


that they have been talking with heavenly visitors? 
And more, that they have just come from a season 
of religious exaltation in which the voice of God 
spoke wonderful things? It seems like selfishness 
on the part of this insistent father to press the 
claims of his suffering epileptic boy upon the atten- 
tion of spiritually-minded men who are so thrilled, 
so near to God, so exalted in their experience! 

But the tragic feature of the story is that these 
disciples seem to have left behind the power that 
blessed them on the mountain-top. They are not 
spiritually able to meet the emergency, though they 
seem to have the disposition. Here is a tragic 
breakdown in a logical sequence. What is the 
worth of a mountain-top experience if there be no 
transmission to the vales below? ‘The thing we 
found on the high levels must be brought down 
into daily life, where people work and wait and 
want. The supreme test of the genuineness of our 
religion 1s not on the mountain-top but in the val- 
ley. Will that glorious thing that thrilled us in the 
quiet mountain, where we saw and felt the presence 
of God and heard His voice, work down here where 
children are sick, parents anxious and evil things 
are always in sight? This is where it does work. 
Men who have really seen the transfigured face of 
Jesus are the ones who make it work. Those who 
know the company of heavenly men and have heard 
the voice of God are those who insist on working it. 

We have been asked to come up into the moun- 


COMRADES OF THE SHINING PLATEAU 73 


tain that we may know the peace, Joy and power 
that fellowship there makes possible. Now, we are 
asked to come down to this sin-sick and disturbed 
world with its acute needs. We are to bring with 
us all the sweetness and joy and spiritual power 
that the high and quiet levels made possible. Let 
us carry in our hearts, like a conquering memory, 
what we saw and heard and felt, and allow nothing 
to spoil our peace nor mar the taste of that fellow- 
ship. Let us save to our hearts for the stress and 
struggle of the valley all these precious experiences 
born of the upper altitudes. 

Let us keep this wonderful power that fills men’s 
souls and thrills their lives through long years of 
hardship and service. It was the memories of the 
mountain-top that sent Blanche Wilson Stead a 
martyr missionary on the plains of Persia through 
the long labours and painful years of sacrificial 
service for the Kurds and mountain barbarians she 
so loved. Her face lighted with a smile of joy even 
amidst the privations of her missionary life and 
even as she breathed her last breath, because she 
was sharing her ‘‘ mountain-top ” joys with her 
poor Persian people. It was the memory of the 
mountain-top of his spiritual experiences in Christ 
which he found with Henry Drummond that took 
Dr. Grenfell from a city practice with preferments 
and honours awaiting him, and sent him to the 
sordid lives, sick bodies and burdened souls of 
Labrador folks. It was the things he saw and felt 


74 COMRADES OF THE SHINING PLATEAU 


on the quiet upper levels of his faith that sent 
David Livingstone, the pathmaker, through the im- 
possible jungle of Africa with his message of hope 
to the most helpless race of the world. It is the 
unforgettable memory of these experiences of the 
heart that has sent hundreds of young men and 
women to the uttermost parts of the earth as light- 
bearers in the darkness. We keep that which 
comes in seasons of sweet fellowship with Him 
only by seeking to share it with others. Our 
power lies in the hills—from it we draw. Down 
here is where our duty calls and to it we respond. 


VI 


SPRINGTIME IN THE 
TWENTY-THIRD PSALM 


“ Not a brooklet floweth 
Onward to the sea, 
Not a sunbeam gloweth 
On its bosom free, 
Not a seed unfoldeth 
To the glorious air, 
But our Father holdeth 
It within His care. 


“Not a floweret fadeth, 
Not a star grows dim, 
Not a cloud o’ershadeth 
But ’tis marked by Him. 
Dream not that thy gladness 
God doth fail to see; 
Think not in thy sadness 
He forgetieth thee. 


“ Power eternal resteth 

In His changeless hand; 

Love immorial hasteth 
Swift at His command. 

Faith can firmly trust Him 
In the darkest hour, 

For the keys she holdeth 
To His love and power.” 

—SELECTED. 


VI 


SPRINGTIME IN THE TWENTY-THIRD 
PSALM 


“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He 
maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me 
beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth 
me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. 
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of 
death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod 
and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table 
before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anoint- 
est my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely 
goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my 
life; and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord for- 
ever.’—PSALM 23. 





% the autumn nor the parchedness of 
summer in this Psalm. They are not features 
of the calendar nor items of the landscape that this 
Psalm knows anything about. The colours here 
painted are natural and living because they are 
painted by an artist who knew the sheen and the 
shape and the sweet odours of the original. He 
gathered the beauty from the spring-green hillsides 
and grass-crowned ridges of his native land and 


77 


78 SPRINGTIME 


wrote them into his Psalms. He walked by the 
rare but quiet pools under the brow of the hills and 
felt the spell of rest and calm. The refreshing 
breath of the morning, out of the dew-drenched 
valleys, poured out upon him and modified the 
burning heat of the noon sun that was scorching 
the earth. These things he saw and felt as he 
wrote his Psalm. - 

Inimitable touches of beauty with exquisite 
vistas opening into the charms of nature exposed 
in these wonderful Psalms have been lost to us 
because we sought here always and only the vocab- 
ulary of devotion to which we are accustomed. We 
are apt to think God must be approached in a cer- 
tain, stereotyped way and that one devotional path- 
way to Him must be the same for us all. Before 
we are aware of it we are often using certain lifeless 
and encrusted forms of speech, out of which, so far 
as we are concerned, vitality and personal meaning 
have gone. We become matter-of-fact at the 
Throne of Grace, our petitions falling into sacred 
formalities which custom has approved, whether or 
not they release for us a single heart-hunger or 
kindle a satisfying emotion or present a single re- 
quest that deeply we yearn for. 

At no place in the varied and precious spiritual 
experiences of God’s people is there such a high 
call for the imagination as in the hours of prayer. 
When men pray they walk into the realms of golden 
mystery where indefinable realities lie large and 


SPRINGTIME 79 


sure all about them. Men, therefore, must carry 
with them into this tremulous atmosphere, into this 
twilight of their praying times, the glowing light 
and the outreaching hand of a sanctified imagina- 
tion. We make a mistake, seriously and spiritually 
hurtful, not so to do. The imagination of an ori- 
ental Psalmist kneeling in prayer, made the dull, 
gray things of the outer world beautiful and signifi- 
cant. They breathed forth upon him a spiritual 
air. God lived within him in a heaven-given com- 
panionship. The mystic gates of a vital faith stood 
wide when the Psalmist prayed. Through them he 
walked, seeing invisible things, rejoicing in a spiri- 
tual loveliness that others did not see and hearing 
voices that others failed to hear. 

In the Twenty-third Psalm the inspired and 
praying man gives his imagination large liberty. 
He thinks of himself as a sheep with all the ordi- 
nary characteristics of a sheep, viz.: a sense of 
dependence, a yearning for leadership, a love of 
green grass, a joy in the nearness of still waters and 
the tranquillity that abides in the seasons of rest in 
the pastures. But the imagining of this praying 
moment would strike us as being gross and low if 
all it did was to portray the Psalmist to himself as 
a sheep. Thinking up to this point and then stop- 
ping, provides no stimulating, spiritual reaction. 
The nobler levels of imagination of this praying 
Psalmist are reached when he imagines God a 
shepherd. 


80 SPRINGTIME | 


This was a daring leap of the inspired imagina- 
tion due to the moving of God’s spirit upon the 
Psalmist. It was an epoch-making revelation. 
The world was waiting for a better, truer interpre- 
tation of God. Here was the culminating peak in 
his thought of God’s love and care of His people. 
What a shepherd did for his flocks on the hills of 
Judza in the winter nights and in the grazing sea- 
son, when grass was scarce and water rare, and in 
the hours of peril when robbers hovered near or 
wolves howled in the shadows, what he, a shepherd, 
did under these various circumstances for his flock; 
that God, in His spiritual oversight, did for him. 
Kneeling to pray and looking up into the Syrian 
sky strewn with white stars that lay like his own 
sheep in some vast field of the night, the Psalmist 
saw God shepherding him. A great flood of tender- 
ness poured out from God’s own heart when the 
Psalmist let his imagination picture Almighty God, 
maker of heaven and earth, as his shepherd. 

Interpreting God in the terms of the shepherd, 
the praying man’s imagination, like the doorkeeper 
of the soul that it is, opened and let in the whole 
field of shepherding activity. Herein he found a 
new and comforting understanding of God. It was 
a revealing moment that illumined the theology of 
the praying writer. For a man to have arrived at 
such a conception of God was a transcendent spiri- 
tual experience. At the heart of this praying affir- 
mation is the idea that God is a shepherd rather 


SPRINGTIME 81 


than an imperial despot. In His shepherding care 
He is a safe guide, a bountiful provider and de- 
pendable keeper, capable of doing in love and in 
gentleness what the shepherd on the plains does 
for his sheep. 

It is the springtime atmosphere of this Psalm 
that is claiming our attention. The chief mark of 
the springtime everywhere is the “ green pastures ” 
that lay so fair and sweet in the holy imagination 
of this praying man. God, even then, was leading 
him through their beauty and verdure, and his soul 
burst into song in the lines of this immortal hymn 
of spiritual rest and satisfaction—‘* The Lord is my 
shepherd, I shall not want.” It is the “ green pas- 
tures ” that always suggest God’s shepherding care. 
This is the preéminence of every springtime. 

A green pasture is no ordinary sight. It leads 
the reverential man Godward. Look at it, coming 
again out of the brown deadness of the winter. It 
is the same glad surprise. The same fresh, unex- 
pected but ever longed-for miracle. The landscape 
slowly warms under the meagre sun. Weary of 
winter, we look across the grey bleakness of the 
hills and wonder when the life we know is hidden 
there, will rise again and fling its beauty over the 
harsh wounds left by the snow and ice. The blue- 
bird, like an electric spark, darts here and there, 
advising impatient men and women of the reason- 
ableness of their expectancy as to grass. Other 
omens of spring-life are in the air. Then a warm 


82 SPRINGTIME 


shower, a day of unbroken sunshine and a strange, 
thin veil of green comes upon the earth. Thin as 
some gauzy mist, it fails to obscure the dull colours 
of winter, but when other days and steadier warmth 
follow then deeper shades of green are spread on 
hill slopes and through the tree-tops and men begin 
to forget that winter ever was. Then the fields 
awake and the whole face of the world changes. 
The tide of grass, for which we have waited, 
sweeps over the land like some vast sea of verdant 
beauty. 

“‘ God is here again,” we say. Yet He is no more 
here in the green grass than in the cold, dead soil of 
the frozen field. But the green, growing grass kin- 
dles our imagination and gives to God’s power and 
love a reality that we fail to appreciate in the mys- 
tery of winter’s deadness. Spring visualizes God in 
action before us in a spectacle whose meaning and 
power we feel. He talks more plainly through the 
living grass than the dead earth. We are more 
alive to His whispering and open larger capacities 
and perceptions in the green pastures than in the 
snowy widths of wintertime. The late Madison 
Cawein had a soul attuned to all the beauties of 
the world; he expressed the feelings of every 
nature lover when he said: 


“ There is no rhyme that is half so sweet 
As the song of the wind in the rippling wheat; 
There is no meter that’s half so fine 
As the lilt of the brook under rock and vine; 


SPRINGTIME 83 


And the loveliest lyric I ever heard 

Was the wildwood strain of a forest bird. 

If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach 
My heart their beautiful parts of speech, 

And the natural art that they say these with, 

My soul would sing of beauty and myth 

In a rhyme and meter that none before 

Have sung in their love, or dreamed in their lore, 
And the world would be richer, one poet the more.” 


The serenity of a life was also suggested to the 
Psalmist by ‘‘ green pastures.” He lies down 
amidst vernal beauty and his heart is at rest. He 
finds a balm of healing for his irritated and per- 
plexed soul as he lies down in the green grass. The 
healing virtue is not in the grass, beguiling as it 
may be, with all its beauty. There is no medicine 
for helping his hurt spirit in the chemistry of the 
grass. The medicinal help for his soul comes from 
his finding that God has not only made the grass 
and laid on its colours and spread it tapestry-wise 
over all the hills, but He has made it for the 
resting-place of His children. Where grass is, 
God’s presence and power are, and peace must live 
in the hearts of His children. 

The shepherding of God does not explain the 
grass. That belongs to His achievements as a Cre- 
ator. The shepherding goes with the Psalmist’s 
lying down in the grass with a sense of peace com- 
ing into his heart through a feeling of God’s love 
and nearness to him, as the pasture’s grass, like a 
book of a thousand leaves, voices it to him. 


84 SPRINGTIME 


Every blade sings of God’s care. Every green 
pathway athwart the hills and fields leads to His 
heart, every valley of verdure tells that He has 
walked that way, the rich growing meadows where 
cattle feed bespeak Him, the highly-coloured mar- 
gins of streams trace His handiwork. Mountain- 
sides, rolling plains, trackless prairies, all speak of 
God’s goodness and care. Whether it be the tiny 
blade fighting for air and sun in the foul shades in 
the unfertile soil of some slum alley or the green 
growth of vast pasture lands of the west, grass 
tells the same story of the Great Shepherd’s 
shepherding. 

The message of eternal springtime in this Psalm, 
so familiar as to seem threadbare, should speak a 
new lesson of peace and spiritual serenity. Look- 
ing at the green earth, through the atmosphere of 
this interpreting Psalm, a new joy in the Shep- 
herd’s provision for His sheep takes hold of the 
heart. Men should grow less self-assertive and less 
materialistic in their souls as the springs come and 
go. Walking under the Shepherd’s care one always 
finds the eternally green pasture-land, and, calmed 
by His voice, the weary lie down and are at peace. 


VII 


A RADIATING 
PERSONALITY 


“Not in robes of purple splendour, nor in silken 
sofiness shod, 
But in raiment worn with travel came their God, 
And the people knew His presence by the heart 
that ceased to sigh, 
When the glory of the Lord was passing by. 


“For He healed the sick at even, and He cured 
the lepers sore, 
And sinful men and women sinned no more, 
And the world grew mirthful-hearted and forgot 
its misery 
When the glory of the Lord was passing by.” 
—W. J. Dawson. 


“TI do not see how we can make sense of Christ's 
words and believe them true, unless we have, at least 
vaguely, in our minds, the permeable structure by which 
I picture our love in its relation to God, a structure such 
that love freely given to any of the children of men 
must, at the same time, pass through him to his Maker. 
Unless the whole structure of divine and human love 1s 
thus permeable, I cannot understand how our human 
love and our worship, our love of nature and of country, 
of work, of play and of God can mingle and reinforce 
each other as they do. Furthermore, unless we think of 
our own personality in such relation to Infinite Person- 
ality as I have hinted, I do not see how any sociable 
human being can bear, without intolerable humiliation, 
the volume of affection and gratitude that is poured upon 
him. In practice one explains it, one makes it sweet and 
sane, only by passing 1t on.”—RicHuarp C, Casor, M.D. 


Vil 


A RADIATING PERSONALITY 
“Ve are the light of the world.”—MAatTHEw 5: 14. 


i¢ ysTiE metallurgists and chemists of the 

ee oti 

ry WaeR present day all agree that among the 
ONG baffling metals of the earth none is 

i Ys» more baffling than radium. One need 
ie neither a metallurgist nor a chemist to know 
enough of this miracle-working metal to make illus- 
trative use of it in attempting to answer a very 
important question. The question is, ‘“‘ what con- 
stitutes the active elements in that most radi- 
ating thing the world ever saw, viz.: human 
personality? ” 

Little by little, great physicists like Becquerel, 
Rutherford, Schmidt, and notably Madame Curie, 
discovered a strange new form of energy they 
called radioactivity. It belongs to certain metals 
like uranium, thorium, actinium, and specially to 
radium. Of this power-filled group of metals, 
radium is the king. A profound secret of nature 
till 1895. 

Radium pours forth a stream of phosphorescent 
energy so potent and complex that it immediately 
breaks successively into eight other different kinds 


87 





88 A RADIATING PERSONALITY 


of energies. Each emanation of energy that breaks 
forth is more powerful than the original emanation 
out of which it came. For instance, the Gamma 
Ray, which is the third stream to break off, is one 
hundred thousand times more powerful than the 
ray out of which it comes. 

Out of a ton of pitchblende, a rock from the 
Colorado mountains, we get just about enough 
radium to hold on the point of a needle. Yet so 
active and eager is this dynamic metal that this 
load on the needle-point pours forth, as in a tiny 
Niagara, sixty-two million phosphorescent particles 
every second of its existence. And so rich in power 
is this energetic, light-bearing, heat-making radium 
that it is practically inexhaustible in its radiating 
power. Its light seems never to go out, its power 
never to slacken, its radiation never to halt. Of 
course, every spark that radiates does represent 
the wreckage of some particle of matter or the com- 
bustion of some infinitesimal globule of gas, yet 
after that tiny bit of radium on the point of a 
needle has been pouring forth its fiery ardour for 
three hundred years, its mass will have been re- 
duced but one-half and the power of the remnant 
will remain unabated! It will go on for thirteen 
hundred more years radiating its starry brightness, 
coating other bodies with light, clothing other bits 
of matter with power, healing diseased tissue and 
pouring its benign heat waves into the cold and 
cheerless earth! Such energy the world hitherto 


A RADIATING PERSONALITY 89 


had never heard of! Such power is beyond the 
dreams of imagination! This is radium! 

Because radium liberates into life such exhaust- 
less streams of energy and touches with phosphor- 
escence and power everything that comes into the 
zone of its contact, this metal serves as an illustra- 
tion of that radiating, dynamic thing we call human 
personality. Here is a helpful analogy that we may 
keep in mind while talking about those things that 
make personality radiant and pervasive. When 
Jesus said to His disciples, ‘“‘ Let your light so 
shine,” He had in mind the active energy that lives 
in, and pours forth from, a moral character. He 
had in mind the spiritual influences that radiate 
into life with as much reality as do the phosphor- 
escent stars of radium, touching with their con- 
tagious light and power all about them. 

We shall take for granted one or two things. 
First, that personality which cannot be defined 
with classroom accuracy is simply the sum total of 
everything that a man is, fused into oneness and 
charged with a spiritual radioactivity that pours 
forth ceaselessly. Personality is something that we 
recognize long before we can analyze or define. It 
is the total qualities and traits of the whole man 
unified and spiritualized and pouring forth a cur- 
rent of spiritual power that is just as real and dyna- 
mic in its touch as the green fire of radium. 

Personality is an atmospheric thing that comes 
from within. Personality is not brains, nor golden 


90 A RADIATING PERSONALITY 


eloquence, nor geniality, nor willpower, nor fine 
features, nor good manners, nor harmless disposi- 
tion, nor vast stores of knowledge, nor rigid per- 
sonal discipline, it is not any one of these things, 
nor all of them combined. These qualities might 
be in the possession of an individual and yet that 
individual lack the something needed to fuse them 
together and thus release into life that spiritualized 
energy which corresponds to the radioactivity that 
pours forth from radium like a shower of golden 
stars. It is not what we add to the exterior that 
makes personality. It is not what we gather from 
without and store away within that makes person- 
ality. It is that which we have within, unified 
under the heat of our own experience, organized 
under the control of our own wisdom and directed 
by the pressure of unselfish considerations, that be- 
comes dynamic and contagious with that winsome 
power that all men recognize. Homely men have 
it, unbeautiful women have it, eccentric people have 
it. Unlettered people have it. 

What is this active element in personality that 
seems not conditioned by external things? ‘That is 
the question to be answered. 

Everybody wants to locate that particular 
thing that guarantees a radiating personality. 
Business men want it. Salesmen on the street 
want it. Teachers want it. Society women want 
it. Leaders in every realm of life are asking 
what that contagious and quickening element is, 


A RADIATING PERSONALITY 91 


that makes personality vital and power-giving. 
What is it? 

The vitalizing, animating thing in human person- 
ality is enthusiasm. This, in itself, needs to be ex- 
plained and its cause assigned. Enthusiasm has 
more to do with human personality in making it 
effective than any other thing. Enthusiasm is a 
keen delight in what you are, in what you say, in 
what you do, and in what comes to you in life. En- 
thusiasm is a deep joy in living, that fills your 
words with power, lights your face with smiles and 
makes the touch of your personality a thrilling ex- 
perience. There are business men dead at their 
desks, preachers dead in the pulpit. Women dead 
in their households. Scholars dead in school. Not 
literally physically dead, but living so completely 
without spirit or joy or vigour in their lives that 
they quicken and arouse no one they touch any 
more than those who have ceased to live. They are 
dead! Personality is suppressed! Its energy is 
throttled. Its current is grounded! There may be 
physical equipment and mental gifts and accesso- 
ries of various sorts, the very things out of which 
personality could make a masterpiece of high- 
powered human character, but that eager, alert, re- 
sponsive something that ought to leap forth and 
touch you and compel you is passive, inert, dead. 

Oh, the dried, empty wells of enthusiasm! Here 
is the explanation of the pathetic story of how men 
and women have become dead and withered and 


92 A RADIATING PERSONALITY 


utterly useless in life. There is a reason. The 
world wants joy and ardour, wants happiness and 
hope in those whom it is asked to follow. The rea- 
son leaders are uncrowned and dethroned and men 
of power lose their sceptres is because they ceased 
to take life joyously. ‘They ceased to greet its 
changes and responsibilities and problems with en- 
thusiasm. They die in heart life. They should 
listen to Browning when he says in “ Rabbi Ben 
Baza 


“Then welcome each rebuff 
That turns each smoothness rough, 
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! 
Be our joys three-parts pain! 
Strive, and hold cheap the strain; 
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge 
the throe!” 


Now, in order to keep full the springs of enthusi- 
asm and thus keep the power of personality at its 
maximum, let the following suggestions be kept 
in mind: 

Where does this spiritual radium get its glow? 
How is the wonderful phosphorescence of the heart 
born and how is this spiritual fire in the soul re- 
plenished out from inexhaustible supplies? Can 
we be assured of a continuous stream of this fine 
energy and winsome power from within? That is 
the question. Here is the answer: 

Lay into a man’s soul certain great, unchanging 
facts that become a part of his spiritual makeup 


A RADIATING PERSONALITY  — 98 


and put his life into the grip of certain great con- 
ceptions of truth and duty and you’ve started the 
phosphorescence and power. ‘There are certain 
great convictions that kindle the central fires in 
men. ‘They cause personality to overflow. They 
Start spiritual radiation. It was the presence of 
big, gripping ideas in his heart that set Lincoln’s 
soul on fire. It was the heat and glow of the deep 
things in D. L. Moody’s heart that started a 
spiritual conflagration in his life and eventually 
throughout the world. It was the moral passion, 
born of great principles wrought into his soul, that 
made Theodore Roosevelt the powerful personality 
that he was. All radiation is born of inward heat. 
Here are certain truths that put the fires under 
personality: 

A right view of your moral responsibility in 
the world. 

A proper outlook on life. 

A true estimate of man. 

A keen sense of the reality of the spiritual life. 

There is no spiritual radiation where these 
power-giving ideas are wanting. 

Life takes on great meaning for any man when 
he recognizes his place in relation to God and the 
moral order. He arises at once far above the level 
of the creation to which he physically belongs and 
becomes a sharer with God in traits of character 
and in moral responsibility. Let any man deny his 
moral responsibility in this world or the next and 


94 A RADIATING PERSONALITY 





refuse to accept any responsibility for his decisions 
and character, and you have a dangerous moral 
anarchist in the realm of human living and con- 
duct. He is a disquieting factor in any of life’s 
relations. A man out of harmony with the moral 
order and going it alone on lines of his own selfish 
determination is like a planet that has jumped its 
orbit. It has become a wild, lawless, perilous thing. 
Disaster is certain and soon. Men never glow with 
any kind of moral power if they fail to find and 
acknowledge definitely their place in the world of 
right living and clearly accept responsibility in the 
matter of moral conduct. 

If a man sees behind every decent municipal 
ordinance, every fair legislative statute, every con- 
stitutional amendment, every code of right living, 
the holy sanction that comes from its relation to a 
supreme moral order, he has a new enthusiasm and 
a stronger purpose in living up to the last letter of 
every law of the realm. Lawless men are godless 
men. They set themselves against the universe. 
They see no roots to these laws setting deep in the 
soil of infinite rightness. It is our personal relation 
to God and our responsibility to Him as the seat 
and centre of moral order that puts joy and fire 
and persistency into our purposes to meet the de- 
mands of righteousness. This works to put a radi- 
ant glow into our personality. You co-operate with 
every police department in the world and reinforce 
the efforts of every law and order league in ex- 


A RADIATING PERSONALITY 95 


istence when you persuade men to find their place 
and take their responsibility in the moral order. 
Let a man get out from under a sense of moral re- 
sponsibility, let life free itself from all inward 
coercion, feel no moral urge, no sense of account- 
ability, and a man’s motive power in the direction 
of all good is gone. He may be a bandit or a burg- 
lar. He has no chart, no compass, no port. He is 
a dangerous derelict on the sea of life! To feed 
the moral fires in the soul you must get a right 
notion of your place in the moral order. 

A proper outlook on life makes for spiritual 
radiation, for sustained enthusiasm is personality. 
Tell me how a man looks at life and I can tell you 
what his personality and character mean to his 
generation. It depends on the way you look at life 
and what you see when you do look, whether your 
personality is a spiritual blight that withers and 
depresses all it touches, or whether it thrills men 
with hopes of better and nobler things. The 
trouble with the political leaders of Russia’s revo- 
lution was that they looked out on life and saw 
nothing but a struggle for economic equality. Life 
was but a tragic battle for existence that had to be 
gone through with. Its supreme achievement was 
to be reached through a victorious class struggle in 
which, finally, every man without regard to deserts 
shared equally with every other man, the food, the 
clothes, the music, the art that are in the world. 
Life is at a sad, low level when this view obtains. 


96 A RADIATING PERSONALITY 


Some of our own literary men apparently look on 
life as a drab, dreary procession of personal experi- 
ences moving on the lower levels, knowing nothing 
of sunlit mountain-tops or fruitful plains. If life 
were nothing more than “ Main Street ” portrays, 
existence truly would be melancholy and futile. 
Contrast the personal experience and ideals of life 
in “‘ Main Street ” with life as revealed in ‘‘ The 
Americanization of Edward Bok,” or the ‘ Letters 
of Walter Hines Page,” the “ Life of Florence 
Nightingale,” or the ‘ Life of Booker T. Washing- 
ton ”—or the “ Book of Isaiah,” or Paul’s ‘‘ Letter 
to the Philippians.” 

The outgoing power in its soul and the range and 
quality of that power depend upon how you look at 
life. Lord Tennyson said to the thoughtless, trivial 
men of his day who were using life for fun and 
money-making and the getting of power: 


“Life is not an idle ore; 
But tron dug from central gloom 
And heated hot with burning fears, 
And dipt in baths of hissing tears 
And battered with the strokes of Doom 
To shape and use.” 


Till men feel the urge that our Lord felt when 
He said, ‘‘ I must work the work of him that sent 
me while it is day,’”’ and until they set about as did 
He to make every hour sacred and serious with a 
great purpose there will be no radiating of the soul, 


A RADIATING PERSONALITY 97 


no spiritual glow falling into life. No moral en- 
thusiasm that will abide. 

A true estimate of man keeps the glow within a 
man’s soul and maintains his enthusiasm. 

The world has never forgiven Robert Ingersoll 
and his lesser imitators who quote him, for the dis- 
paraging remark credited to him that “ the more he 
saw of men the better he liked dogs.” There was a 
bitter cynicism and a degraded notion of manhood 
in the statement that has put an additional taint on 
the memory of Ingersoll along with the shocking 
memory of his agnosticism and blasphemy. His 
views of man as well as his view of God disqualified 
him for service and leadership. People would not 
accept his views of man any more than they would 
his views of God. Old General William Booth saw 
humanity dwarfed and broken in the slums and 
vileness of London, yet the estimate of man on 
which he built his life’s work was noble and inspir- 
ing. The more he saw of poor, deformed, blighted 
men the more he loved men! He saw man at his 
worst but not one syllable of cynicism nor despair 
ever escaped his lips. Why? Because he saw in 
men-——no matter how low and disabled—the ability 
for something better and greater when once the 
golden ideals of love and life and divine grace took 
hold of them. When a man sees the potential 
image of God in the brutal features of a degraded 
fellow and recognizes the supreme call of brother- 
hood to undertake in every way, and by whatever 


98 A RADIATING PERSONALITY 


means available, to bring out in something of its 
true glory the outlines of that divine image, he has 
underwritten with love and hope an inspiring esti- 
mate of man. 

It is what one sees as possible in men who 
have seen a better vision, and have turned to go 
toward it, that keeps our views of men right. It is 
what we see in men like Edward Marsden, the 
Esquimau of Alaska, in Chief Many Goats the 
Navajo, in Ding Li Mai of China, or Konamora 
of Japan, or Papini of Italy, or Billy Sunday of 
baseball fame—men who spurn the lower and lesser 
things of life that once engrossed them and give 
themselves to the higher and holier—that makes 
every man, without regard to state or station, a 
glorious possibility of something godlike. This 
keeps the glow in the soul as we live among men. 
Here is a secret place where permanent enthusiasm 
in life and work is born! 

No man with the right estimate of man will use 
for his selfish purposes the liberty and personality 
of his brother. He will safeguard his physical life 
from long hours of grinding labour. He will re- 
ward with adequate cempensation his days of toil. 
He will go to the ends of the earth where, in dark- 
ened jungles and beneath age-old superstitions, men 
are intellectually and spiritually bound, and seek 
to set them free. He will clasp the hand of men of 
all races and creeds, recognize in them children of 
one Father and brothers of one blood. 


A RADIATING PERSONALITY 99 


But, finally, we come to the most fundamental 
feature in making effective personality and main- 
taining spiritual enthusiasm in a man’s life and 
work. A man must have a keen sense of the reality 
of the spiritual life. Getting hold of a well- 
balanced notion of life as it lies between the ma- 
terial and spiritual factors in it is a great achieve- 
ment for any man. It will go a long way toward 
keeping that man straight and sane and good in all 
of life. Materialism has become an atmosphere in 
which we live. It colours all our thinking and 
doing. We work for material gains in order to live. 
Bread and meat are prime necessities. A bank ac- 
count is a great comfort. A day’s wage is a vital 
necessity. We are close to the earth. We cannot 
help it. Hunger and sickness and death keep us 
ever in proximity to material things. It is no won- 
der that material things hold us and hamper us. 
One understands how the things of time and sense, 
of factories and farms, of desk and mill, crowd the 
spiritual ideals out of men’s lives. Material things 
are so real and urgent and necessary. But they are 
not supreme and final and lasting things. They 
pass with the using. Their urgencies soon cease. 
Their uses soon fail of importance. They are not 
finally and forever dominant. Their glories do not 
abide. Then what? Then comes to those who 
have looked for it, the reality of invisible things. 
What eye hath not seen, nor ear heard will then 
take the supreme and central place in the group of 


100 A RADIATING PERSONALITY 


things with which we deal. Spiritual values live. 
Virtues never die. Moral traits survive when all 
earthly pomp and glories pass. 


“The tumult and the shouting dies; 
The Captains and the Kings depart: 
Still stands thine ancient sacrifice, 
An humble and a contrite heart. 
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, 
Lest we forget—lest we forget! 


“ Far-called, our navies melt away; 
On dune and headland sinks the fire: 
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday 
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! 
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, 
Lest we forget—lest we forget!” 


VIII 


PERFECT PEACE 


“Calm me, my God, and keep me calm, 
Soft resting on Thy breast; 
Soothe me with holy hymn and psalm, 
And bid my spirit rest.” 
—Horatio Bonar. 


“Tet us put by some hour of every day 
For holy things!—Whether 1t be when dawn 
Peers through the window pane, or when the noon 
Flames like a burnished topaz, in the vault, 
Or when the thrush pours in the ear of eve 
Its plaintive melody; some little hour 
Wherein to hold rapt converse with the soul, 
From sordidness and self a sanctuary, 
Swept by the winnowings of unseen wings, 
And touched by the White Light Ineffable!” 

—CLINTON SCOLLARD, 


Vill 
PERFECT PEACE 


“Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind 1s 
stayed on thee.’—IsaIAH 26: 3. 


“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto 
you.”—JOHN 14:27. 


“And the peace of God, which passeth all understand- 
ing, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ 
Jesus.’—PHILIPPIANS 4:7. 


AN speaking of peace we do not have in 

ay mind the thing that men arrive at by 

=I oe laying down arms and signing agree- 
Sve, ments and protocols. The peace we 
seek ie nothing to do with disarmanent nor the 
leaving of the battlefield by opposing troops. It 
knows nothing of such words as ‘“ evacuation,” 
“ surrender,’ ‘subjugation,’ “arbitration.” <A 
military peace is easy, for a few men agree and 
carnage stops. A paper is signed, and the rain of 
bullets and the roar of siege guns cease. But the 
men who leave the trenches, taking their souls with 
them, are just as peaceless in their individual lives, 
just as restless and hungering in their souls, as 
before. Neither the treaty of Tilsit nor Ghent nor 
Paris nor Portsmouth nor Versailles, nor any of 


103 





104 PERFECT PEACE 


the decisions of the Hague Tribunal ever brought 
peace to a single burdened human soul, though 
these decisions and agreements have blessed na- 
tions and changed the destiny of the world. 

We must go onto the battle ground of every 
man’s heart when we talk about the peace of God. 
We must get within the individual soul when we 
take up this peace parley in which God and the 
human soul are the sole participants. 

Is there such a thing as peace and joy in human 
life? Are we chasing a will-o’-the-wisp when seek- 
ing peace? Does a man who lives a sheltered life 
and who stands in a pulpit on Sunday and faces 
with his calm soul a company of perplexed and 
harassed men and women who are moving during 
the week amidst the trying things of business, 
know what a poignant desire for rest fills men’s 
hearts? One standing in the serene and quiet at- 
mosphere of a pulpit behind a Bible, with a choir 
chanting soft measures of music, may easily pro- 
nounce with apostolic fervour a benediction upon 
haunted hearts and distressed minds, saying with 
all sincerity, ‘“‘ Grace, mercy and peace be with you 
all, now and for evermore, Amen.” “ Very easy,” 
says the man with a note at bank coming due next 
morning and no renewal likely and his checking 
account wiped out. ‘‘ Very lovely and spiritual,” 
says a weary mother with a sick child and 
household anxieties, “but what an inconsistent 
and impossible thing.” There are so many harsh 


PERFECT PEACE 105 


noises, so many sharp burdens, so many infest- 
ing cares, So many inescapable sources of trouble 
that these unearthly texts and the pastor’s bene- 
diction seem but a part of the same vague, dreamy 
thing that we follow fruitlessly through a poet’s 
allegory. 

With this great difference, that men Aave found 
and appropriated this peace of God. It is not a 
will-o’-the-wisp. Not an impossible, golden dream 
born of the wishes of harassed men. People know 
when they find it. It is as unmistakable as the 
coming of dawn and sunrise after a dark night. It 
comes as the vernal air of spring to revive and 
beautify after a winter of storm and chill. It calms 
and uplifts the heart like the music of some glori- 
ous anthem. The peace of God in a world of war 
and a life of sin is a fact. 

It is to be kept in mind, when we talk of the 
peace of God, that the supreme conditions of this 
peace lie inside. The outside has little or nothing 
to do with a man’s signing this compact of peace 
with God and claiming it. The late George Mathe- 
son, the blind Scotch preacher, in speaking of the 
supremacy of the inside over the outside, said, 
“‘ Many a physical impression which was a pleasure 
yesterday becomes a pain today,” because the in- 
side has changed. Nobody revels more in wood 
and field than the happy lover, but that same lover 
unhappy is offended by that which once made him 
glad, and he cries, 


106 PERFECT PEACE 


“Ve banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon 
How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair.” 


It is the fact of the inside being absolutely uncon- 
querable by the outside that makes this peace of 
God pass the understanding. How a zone of calm 
can hold the centre of a man’s life while storms 
rage all about is not explainable apart from faith 
in God. 

Five hundred years ago John Huss met the 
storms of a hating Church. The world of organ- 
ized religion rose against him. The august Council 
of Constance treated him with brutal disregard and 
condemned him without fair hearing. He was 
chained in a poisoned prison for months and finally 
brought into an open square and pinioned to the 
stake. The mobs jeered while fagots were piled 
about him and the flames finally consumed his poor 
body. Yet John Huss had in it all the peace of 
God that passed the understanding of men. Men 
held their breath in amazement at the serenity 
of Huss. 

“Chinese”? Gordon, in a whirlwind of angry 
hornets in besieged Khartoum, died chanting the 
twenty-first and thirty-first Psalms. The madhi 
and his fanatical, dervish warriors raved about 
Gordon’s garrison. Famine, physical suffering, 
and anxiety pressed Gordon on every hand. The 
ministry of Gladstone seemed to have forgotten 
him in the slow response to his cry for help. 


PERFECT PEACE 107 


The furious storm finally broke and Gordon and 
his besieged men fell. But in all the distress of 
the long, harrowing experience a calm peace rested 
in Gordon’s heart. He had what fortresses of guns 
and superior forces could not have provided, and 
he died a patriot, Christian martyr, with the peace 
which passes understanding keeping his mind. 
Some years ago I walked as far as I could in 
company with a dear friend who was starting on a 
journey. The journey which he was to undertake 
was long and full of mystery. It was not taken on 
his own initiative and it was one from which he 
was not to return. He knew that every step of 
every day brought him nearer to the hour of his 
departure. There were trying experiences in con- 
nection with his going. He had made ample pro- 
vision for his loved ones during what was to be a 
prolonged absence, but even that achievement 
brought no tranquillity. He never talked about 
his bank account when discussing his leave-taking. 
He had influence commercially which had been 
gained during a long life of successful business, but 
as he took my hand and we walked together toward 
the gateway out of which he was to pass, he did not 
once refer to any satisfaction from his influence in 
the commercial world. The nearer he came to the 
time of his going, the more sure he was of a fixed, 
undisturbed joy and peace that God had given him 
while on one occasion he was reading the eighth 
chapter of Romans. It was in his heart every 


108 PERFECT PEACE 


moment, and it was that spirit-given blessing that 
came as he read, that brought him rest and victory! 
And, as we finally parted, he bade me farewell with 
a smile on his face that shines in my memory like 
some foregleam of heaven, and I felt afresh the 
meaning of Whittier’s lines: 


“Alas, for him who never sees 
The stars shine through his cypress trees, 
Who, hopeless, lays his dead away 
Nor looks to see the breaking day.” 


But this peace of God is not simply available at 
the great crises in life,—few of which come to us— 
but for the constantly recurring exasperations and 
irritations of every day. And, after all, this is its 
chief testing field. Men want an available joy and 
peace to live by every day. It is a power living in 
us daily to hold us in restraint. Is your temper 
control under a strain? Do you grow impatient 
when purposes are crossed and plans thwarted? 
Are you often hurt and quite unhappy while wait- 
ing for apologies that never come? Do you pass 
gloomy and irritable days when a difference of 
opinion or counter-judgment of others blocks some 
scheme of yours? Do you murmur when the day’s 
task is long and its complications exacting? Do 
you have any effective method of dealing with daily 
troubles? Have you a harbour in which you can 
anchor when the storms rise? Do you have a quiet 
zone in your heart, like the quiet zone around a 


PERFECT PEACE 109 


hospital, into which you take the disordered and 
fractured feelings of your life and readjust and 
soothe them? Have you a deep place in your being 
-where reason and good sense and faith in God sit 
on the throne and wherein is an unbroken sway 
af peace? 

You are entitled to all this, under the articles of 
your faith. You are not getting all that is due you 
from your trust in God and the realities of your 
religion. There is a land of pure delight in every 
Christian heart where no intruder breaks in and 
spoils its peace. A busy man must find it and keep 
it or he will go down under the storms that beat 
against him. A busy, burdened woman must find 
it and keep that deep, serene, quiet place in her 
soul, or life loses its joy and power. It is there the 
best of life finds root. It is there the things of God 
and eternity grow. It is out from that holy, quiet 
spot God helps us to rule our lives in every hour 
and in everything. ‘“ Thou wilt keep him in perfect 
peace whose mind is stayed on thee.” 


“We bless Thee for Thy peace, O God, 

Deep as the boundless sea. 

It falls like sunshine on the road 
Of those who trust in Thee. 

That peace which suffers and is strong, 
Trusts where it cannot see; 

Deems not the way a way too long, 
But leaves the end to Thee.” 


hg 


i 


is 
Ny We re ei 


nae, 
ri finan) ‘i wee 
tei "A 





IX 


MAN’S MIND 


“T cannot think nor reason; 

I only know He came 

With hands and feet of healing 
And wild heart all aflame. 

With eyes that dimmed and softened 
At all the things He saw, 

And in His pillared singing 
I read the marching law. 

I only know He loves me, 
Enfolds and understands— 

And oh, His heart that holds me; 
And oh, His certain hands!” 

—WILLARD WATTLES. 


“For like the seas are His mysteries, not to be 
learned from a single surf-beat. 
No wave suffices Him for a revelation. 
How like the seas that dower all lands with 
green and the breath of blossoms, 
With dews that never have heard its deathless 
surges. 
Let me be patient, then—sure that stars are not 
jetsam tossing 
On meaningless waters of waste Omnipotence. 
Let me be patient, even when man is sunk in 
the storm of His purpose; 
And swirled a strangled corpse, under His ages.” 
—CaLE Younc Rice. 


IX 
MAN’S MIND 


“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God . . . with all 
thy soul and with all thy mind.’-—MAatTTHEW 22: 37. 


“T will put my laws into their mind.’—Herprews 8: Io. 


“Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind.” 
—I[ PETER I: 13. 







Ay fers HE supreme thing in the whole cata- 
at let logue of things from the primordial cell 
iy) OG to God on His throne, is the thing we 
Ni 5 call mind. It is herein that the mys- 
eT eign called God’s image dwells. It is by the 
capacities and abilities of this thing called mind 
that the secrets of time and eternity are read. By 
it is wealth of earth and sea and sky discovered, 
the pathways into the unexplored and unexplained 
followed, the fathomless deeps of men’s souls 
plumbed and the unreachable heights of God ap- 
proached. ‘There is no miracle so wonderful as 
the gradual unfolding of the baby’s mind in the 
presence of the strange phenomena of life; nothing 
more awe-inspiring than the conquering powers of 
the mind of great philosophers. 

It would be a tragedy to find that religion had 
no place in the mind. A man moving in the world 


113 


114 MAN’S MIND 


would feel himself shut within a room of oppressive 
darkness and horror were he compelled to believe 
that in all the movements of matter and in all the 
unfolding features of life there was no mind to 
which his mind might respond. Were there no 
gleam of an intellect in all the dreary vastness of 
matter, no hint of-the mind in the great spaces, no 
clew to thought amidst the sweeping orbits of 
worlds, no intelligence in the ordering of affairs 
calling to his intelligence—just blind matter mov- 
ing as blind chance might dictate; life here would 
be a desperate enterprise leading us toward nothing 
but hopelessness and despair. 

There are certain things the human mind asks 
of its religious faith in order to find intellectual 
satisfaction in it. 

1. Some explanation of the vast material and 
spiritual universe. Who made it? 

2. Some definite assurances as to the benign and 
wise control of all human affairs. Who runs it? 

3. Some definite assurances as to a competent 
source of moral order in the universe. What is 
the purpose in it? 

4. Some satisfactory statement as to the relation 
between God and the thinking mortal man here on 
earth. What is to become of it? 

A religion that can be found capable of satisfying 
these major longings of men in these vital particu- 
lars will rise and stand like some shining beacon on 
a dark sea, bringing hope and joy to the whole race. 


MAN’S MIND 115 


1. The mind wants to know what lies behind all 
this great infinite spectacle called the universe. 
“Whence?” “ When? ’?, “Howe,” °° Whither?” 
“What of it?’ These are the old interrogations 
that have chafed in men’s minds since time began. 
Science has no answer. Science is not expected to 
do other than set facts in order after she has dis- 
covered them. She catalogues the stars, analyzes 
the stones, ascertains the chemical components of 
all things and sets her discoveries before us. There 
science stops. It is the end of her path. The plod- 
ding workman that digs up a buried city in Meso- 
potamia leaves me to find the architect whose glory 
it enshrines. The microscope, the telescope and 
the spectroscope, all speaking together, say, ‘‘ We 
can go no further. Here are the facts that by our 
aid wisdom produces—make the most of them.” 
It is at this point where the Christian religion steps 
in. Faith accepts the challenge of the sciences that 
have nobly gone their length. It says, behind all 
these things of the material universe is God—a 
personal, self-revealing, infinite, holy, loving God. 

“The sea is his for he hath made it.” “ The 
moon and the stars which he hath ordained.” ‘“ By 
him were all things made that are made, and with- 
out him was nothing made that is made.” “ In the 
beginning, God.” 

The Christian religion has never undertaken to 
tell how God made the universe. It makes no 
difference to Genesis how God made it. The 


116 MAN’S MIND 


Bible’s only desire 1s to proclaim God as its 
“creator, upholder and bountiful preserver.” If 
creation came through long stages of evolution, it 
was His plan and purpose! If the process was 
instant, it was His power at work. The Christian 
religion holds that Almighty God is the maker of 
heaven and earth, even though His way and mode 
of making it rest in mystery. ‘It is he that hath 
made us and not we ourselves.” ‘“‘ He is our God 
and we are his people.” 

2. Another inquiry of the mind must be an- 
answered. Who orders the affairs of this world? 
Is it some infinite, gracious autocrat who sits on a 
throne and exacts obedience to detailed orders is- 
sued millions of years agor Are we like little 
insignificant motes in the movements of great 
worlds? Are we swept this way and that by the 
changing winds of chance? Does my daily experi- 
ence concern anybody but myself? Am I drifting 
aimlessly or is there a chart by which my going is 
marked? And is the chart drawn in wisdom and 
love? Is there a general superintendent of the 
system? Is there a system, a comprehensive plan 
that includes all men and everything? What is 
pushing me on? Who is holding me back? Is 
there a benign, gracious overshadowing of my free 
life by some infinite, wise and tender hand? Who 
is running this cosmic thing of which I seem but 
an infinitesimal part? 

This is one of the world’s most tormenting ques- 


MAN’S MIND 117 


tions. ‘The old pagans said, “ Angry gods this 
world rule, and they must be appeased by sacri- 
fices!”’ ‘“ Blind, relentless fates hold your life; 
cruel and mocking, they order your way.” 
“Therefore, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow 
we die! ” 

To this piteous call of the mind our Christian 
faith answers with profound assurance in the lan- 
guage of one of our own poets: 


“ Behind the dim unknown 
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch 
above His own,” 


For men of the Christian faith the dread of 
chance is gone! The hateful power of Fate is no 
more! ‘In him we live and move and have our 
being.” ‘The Lord is my shepherd.” ‘If God 
so clothe the grass of the field . . . shall he not 
much more clothe you?” “Cast all your care 
upon him for he careth for you.” 

This is not philosophy, nor metaphysics, nor 
even theology. This is the actual achievement 
of faith! 


“TI know not where His islands lift 
Their fronded palms in air, 
I only know I cannot drift 
Beyond His love and care!” 


3. What about any fixed source and centre of 
moral order in this world? Is there one? Who 


118 MAN’S MIND 


can tell? Do human laws create that centre? Do 
the legislatures of the states and the parliaments 
of men determine what is morally right and what is 
morally wrong? Is there anything that guarantees 
the eternal character of right? Who put this mys- 
terious thing at work within me that we call con- 
science? Does it point back to anything more than 
habit arising from doing things the same way again 
and again? Is it some borrowed sense of higher 
things? Who speaks to me in the quiet of the night 
and, like some audible voice, reminds me that the 
thing I did ten years ago or fifty years ago was 
wrong? What is it we violate besides the written 
laws? What is it that condemns us for wrongs 
long before we break the statutes of the state or 
outrage openly the moral code of society? Is 
there any fountain of rightness that flows down 
into life? 

The old Greeks had Olympus the home of their 
gods and their chief seat of moral sanctions. But 
there was pandemonium and moral chaos on 
Olympus. Greece had no moral universe. ‘There 
was no unity of moral standards, no sufficient 
source of moral order anywhere in the Greek or 
Roman world. Everyone was a law unto himself. 
Our Christian religion safeguards the unchanging 
sanctity of moral order by finding at the centre of 
the universe an infinitely holy, righteous, just and 
moral being out of whose life all goodness and 
rightness come and whose unchanging character 


MAN’S MIND 119 


underwrites the stability of all moral order. Men 
who draw their motives from this high source have 
never-failing supplies at their disposal. When a 
law starts at this upper level or an action is born 
at this source, its rightness is never questioned! 
Into this holy of holies we must carry for testing, 
the items of our conduct, the things of daily prac- 
tice, the policies and programs of life. Here is a 
sanction that is unchanging and essential. ‘‘ The 
righteous Lord loveth righteousness,” Ps. 11: 7. 
“As for God, his ways are perfect,” Ps. 18: 30. 
“Thy righteousness is everlasting righteousness,” 
Ps. 119: 142. That light at our elbow comes from 
the central power plant. This moral incandescence 
in our dark world is born of God, the centre of all 
moral order. | 

4. Amidst the age-old, unanswered questions of 
the mind has been another which Christianity alone 
has undertaken to answer. What relation is this 
thinking mortal, who is here today and gone to- 
morrow, to this infinite God—the source of all 
things and the general superintendent of all affairs? 

Is mankind an embarrassing accident amidst the 
star-dust and fire-dust of these inanimate worlds? 
What is his place and destiny? If he is not wholly 
dust, but has something immortal and God-like in 
him, is he not out of harmony with his surroundings 
where the bulk of things is mere fleeting matter? 
How shall we classify him? Is he simply another 
combination of phosphates and lime and _nitro- 


120 MAN’S MIND 


genous matter? ‘The agnostics and cynics of every 
age have commented variously on the situation. 
They have made gruesome jokes and trivial com- 
ments on the brief, ambitious, but futile career of 
a man who “begins life with a cry and ends it 
with a sigh.” 

The world has been reassured at this point by 
our faith in a most positive fashion. Our faith 
holds that we not only came from God and go to 
God, but that our life here and hereafter is God’s 
life! We are one with Him. We are wrapped in 
His destiny. Our personal existence is identified 
with His personal existence. We live as long as He 
lives! This is the unique and hitherto unheard-of 
truth that Christ revealed! It clothes our poor 
miserable mankind with dignity and glory. It 
guarantees to us immortality and makes the here- 
after a happy, comforting certainty! It was this 
mystical oneness that Jesus urged as a fact and as 
a precious experience upon His disciples. To this 
great fact we anchor our faith for the endless mor- 
row. One with Him, our changeless God and 
guide, we go on amidst the shifting scenes of this 
present life with songs of hope steadying our 
hearts! He lives and so shall we. Our littleness 
will take on something of His amplitude and 
grandeur. 

Upon these great facts our faith rests. ‘“ Come 
unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden 
and I will give you rest.” 


xX 


IMMORTALITY 


“But O blithe breeze, and O great seas, 
Though ne’er, that earliest parting past, 
On your wide plain they join agai, 
Together lead them home at last. 


“One port methought, alike they sought, 
One purpose hold where’er they fare— 
O bounding breeze, O rushing seas! 
At last, at last, unite them there!” 


“So shall it be at last in that bright morning 
When the soul waketh, and life’s shadows flee; 
O, in that hour, and fairer than day's dawning 
Shall rise the glorious thought, I am with Thee.” 
—Harrigt BEECHER STOWE. 


Xx 


IMMORTALITY 


“Who hath abolished death and hath brought life and 
immortality to light through the gospel.’—II Timotuy 
I: 10. 


SASMMORTALITY is not an original in- 
S@y vention of the Christian faith. It is 
(4 not something achieved for the first 
“ss time by our risen Lord, whose resur- 
celebrate on Easter. It is not new with 
Him as He came out of the tomb. It had its birth 
when God the Creator breathed His own life into 
created man. Immortality is an inherent quality 
of the human soul. The resurrection of Jesus sim- 
ply brings it to light. Easter makes plain some- 
thing that has always existed, but which our human 
sense has never been able to discover nor science 
to prove. 

Sir Isaac Newton, one of the world’s greatest 
mathematicians and phySicists, did not invent grav- 
ity. From the beginning it held worlds in their vast 
sweep through space and stayed the atoms in their 
infinitesimal orbits, but till Isaac Newton, in 1665, 
sitting in his garden at Woolsthorpe, saw an apple ' 
fall from the tree and began to think, the sublime 


123 





124 IMMORTALITY 


fact of universal gravitation remained unknown to 
men. But it always had been. It was not new to 
Newton’s garden, nor a unique quality belonging 
to Newton’s apples. Newton simply brought 
gravity to light. 

Benjamin Franklin was one of the most remark- 
able students and one of the most ingenious in- 
ventors that his day produced. But with his kite 
and key he did not invent electricity, in 1750. 
Neither did Sir Humphry Davy nor Michael Fara- 
day nor Lord Kelvin. These pioneer students of 
nature’s occult forces did not invent nor create a 
single spark of this marvellous force. That ma- 
jestic and mysterious power, like some magic fluid, 
had always saturated every minute ingredient of 
the universe. It had toyed with the planets in 
space and the metals in the heart of the earth since 
the dawn of time’s morning. These great inventors 
simply brought electricity to light. 

Steam is one of the original elements of the 
world of matter. It is water in gaseous condition. 
It was the vapour and mist that hung over chaos 
before matter took form. Bring fire and water to- 
gether and without the slightest chemical change 
the water—that ancient element of creation—be- 
comes steam, and steam has revolutionized the his- 
tory of the human race. Neither the Marquis of 
Worcester nor Thomas Savery invented steam, 
although they thrilled all England, in 1663, by 
using crude steam pumps to drain the mines of 


IMMORTALITY 125 


Cornwall. Neither Papin, the celebrated French- 
man who discovered the piston, in 1795, nor James 
Watt, England’s famous father of steam, who died 
in 1819, as the engines he built were beginning to 
move, created a single ounce of steam. Papin, 
Savery and Watt simply brought steam to light. 

Christopher Columbus did not create America, 
in 1492. Like some phantom island drifting in an 
unknown sea, a vast land lying to the west had 
called to men in their dreams through centuries. 
But darkness covered the horizons and fear shut 
them away from the most glorious continent on the 
surface of the earth. It had no reality to the civil- 
ized world till the little caravels of Columbus broke 
through the barrier of ignorance and fear and lifted 
the veil from America. ‘Till that solemn hour when 
Columbus and his sorely tried crew knelt on the 
shores of America, that which had always been a 
great, rich, potential continent, was as though it 
had never been! Columbus brought America to 
light. Great inquirers and discoverers have bravely 
wrought and sorely sacrificed in order to disclose 
realities that our ignorance has obscured. 

In this same way, Christ has brought life and 
immortality to light. Life has always been a con- 
tinuous, unbroken current. Its reality has never 
been quenched by death, but only when Christ 
brought the fact to visibility did man really know. 
Men saw the stream of life move down through the 
years and disappear into the grave. The earth 


126 IMMORTALITY 


buried life in a silent, meaningless oblivion. Dust 
seemed to be the goal. The tragic terminal of all 
living, so far as the human eye could see, was the 
narrow house of clay. All the pomp and power of 
kings availed nothing to keep life continuously on 
earth. All the wisdom of the wise failed to locate 
life and identify it after it left the body. It ran its 
course for master and servant alike, and both were 
swept out into the dark on the bosom of the same 
resistless tide. No echoes ever came back. No 
signals were ever lifted from the other shore. Tut- 
ankh-amen and his predecessors in power longed 
for a future life and made ready to live in some 
royal realm beyond, but their silent mummified 
forms today tell nothing. Plato reasoned to the 
highest point that the human intellect had ever 
touched, then went bravely, but hopelessly, into the 
night of death. From him no voice has ever been 
heard. The good and the great, the bond and the 
free, the wise and the ignorant, the rich and the 
poor, all alike have moved on in this endless pro- 
cession and have ceased to be. They have silently 
passed to another world through the aperture called 
the grave; they have closed the muffled door behind 
them while the years of silence have lengthened 
into centuries and the centuries into ages. 

Our Christian faith and philosophy join, today, 
in holding that the living stream flows on. Under 
different skies, through other zones, beneath the 
eternal hills of God it flows on and on. The Per- 


IMMORTALITY 127 


sians painted their hopes of everlasting life as the 
flame of an undying fire. The Egyptians carved 
their hopes of immortality in an unfolding lotus 
bud. Socrates saw life on earth as a shadow of the 
real light shining from another world. But the 
mystery grew more deep and the puzzle more 
baffling as the millions of men moved on like 
outgoing caravans that never returned. Finally, 
across the graves of countless noble dead, loving 
friends in hopeless gloom laid an empty, reversed 
torch representing life, forever extinguished. All 
the voices that had hitherto called had found no 
answer. All the visions had faded. All hopes were 
gone. And the world, with its empires fading and 
falling, its monuments and material achievements 
crumbling to dust, its wise men blind and dumb, sat 
down in the shadows to wait and grieve and pray. 
The greatest among them voiced the heart-cry of 
all men when he said, long, long before Easter 
morning had dawned, “‘ Oh, that some God or God- 
man would come and take this darkness. from 
our eyes.” 

No wonder we sing our most joy-giving anthems 
at Easter! We do well to decorate the churches 
with finest flowers at that glad festival. There is a 
reason! There is here, today, the answer to an 
age-old question that has shut the hearts of men in 
prisons of fear and bound their lives in anxiety and 
despair. This day a new visibility was brought to 
the thing men yearned for, so long hidden in the 


128 IMMORTALITY 


mist of a world’s ignorance. There is a new reality 
to the spiritual life that Easter underwrites. There 
is a note of hope which the resurrection of our Lord 
gives to our song. Life here takes on a new glory 
and a nobler dignity because of what Easter prom- 
ises. ‘‘ He [our risen Lord] hath abolished death 
and hath brought life and immortality to light.” 

Since that word has been spoken there has been 
continual springtime in the soul. No matter how 
drear and chill the shadows of winter may have 
been, the warm springtime of hope returns. There 
is a new slant to the sunlight as it falls across the 
open doorway of our Lord’s empty tomb. There is 
a kindling glow in the sunlight as it issues forth 
from the little garden of victory where they had 
laid Him whom death could not hold. There is a 
reviving power in the rays of the sun as it steals 
across the hill under which His deserted tomb has 
lain for two thousand years. 

Death and winter interpreted in terms of our spi- 
ritual life are parallel features. The springtime of 
hope and the Easter life have sealed the doom of 
both. They have lost their power. Their sceptre 
has gone. Endless life and growth are ours. Spiri- 
tual joy and peace abide. The future is glad with 
its open doorway into a larger life and a more glori- 
ous light. With Whittier we know 


“ That love will dream and faith will trust 
(Since He who knows our need is just.) 
That somehow, somewhere, meet we must.” 


AL 


MARTHA AND MARY 


“The Sons of Mary seldom bother, for they have 

inherited that good part, 

But the Sons of Martha favour the Mother of 
the careful soul and the troubled heart. 

It is their care that the gear engages, tt is their 
care that the switches lock; 

It is their care that the wheels run truly; it 1s 
their care to.embark and entrain, 

Tally, transport and deliver duly the Sons of 
Mary by land and main. 


“And the Sons of Mary smile and are blessed— 

they know the angels are on their side. 

They know in them is the Grace confessed, and 
for them are the Mercies multiplied. 

They sit at the Feet—they hear the Word—they 
know how truly the Promise runs. 

They have cast their burden on the Lord, and 
—the Lord He lays it on Martha’s Sons.” 

—RupyarpD KipLine, 


“Their furrows down the fields of years 
Are straight and true and deep. 
O simple ploughmen pioneers, 
God rest you in your sleep! 
And we who swell with lusty breath 
The ballads of the brave, 
Will rouse a chant for noble death 
And sing tt o’er your grave.” 
—Onmar BARKER. 


XI 


MARTHA AND MARY 


“ Martha received him into her house. And she had a 
sister called Mary which also sat at Jesus’ feet and heard 


his word. But Martha was cumbered about much 
serving.”’—LUKE 10: 38-40. 
HIS text has afforded ministers a very 


Us) Se 


4 Kiva wide and suggestive field for their busi- 
| ma ness of interpreting and applying truth. 
ey G25 Confronting the profound truth lying 
in this text and seeking to do justice to both of 
these immortal sisters, it will be in order to under- 
take a consideration of their viewpoints of life and 
the very practical significance in the world’s work 
of such diverse temperaments as they represent. 
There is a charitable view of this surprising bit of 
domestic discussion. There need be no harsh judg- 
ments delivered. The facts are not all presented in 
the story. Every reader must supply them and 
every woman can. 

One appreciates the scrupulous care and nervous 
efficiency of Martha in all the necessary matters of 
the housekeeping, and estimates highly the worth 
of a woman of her kind at every needy point in the 
world’s work. One had best be cautious in joining 


131 













132 MARTHA AND MARY 


in the too general deprecation of Martha’s being 
busy preparing for the comfort of her family and 
guests, while there was at hand a great chance for 
inspiration that she seemed to slight. We shall 
always regret that it happened as it did and that 
the kitchen work that engaged Martha’s mind had 
to be done, keeping her occupied while so rare a 
companion as Jesus was under her roof. We must 
have more incriminating facts in hand than we 
have before allowing a condemnation of Martha’s 
moral tastes. We will always deeply regret the loss 
she met through the heavy pressure of household 
work, but also we will recognize gratefully her gift 
for effective hospitality. 

One must love the large-mindedness and spiri- 
tuality of Mary, and truly appreciate the place in 
the world’s work that such people with their rapt 
souls and ardent natures occupy. They hear the 
higher calls and are always reaching for the nobler 
visions. We will not join in reproving Mary for 
what seemed an unsisterly shirking of the domestic 
duties and an unkind burdening of Martha. We 
need not quibble about small things suggested in 
the incident, nor over-analyze the weakness and 
one-sidedness of the good women. There are large 
principles involved here that may be lost sight ot 
when teachers undertake to interpret Jesus as un- 
qualifiedly rebuking Martha and positively com- 
mending Mary. Such conclusion leaves the picture 
unfinished and its implications unfair. 


MARTHA AND MARY 133 


The following observations should be made: 

1. We are indebted to Martha. 

2. We are indebted to Mary. 

3. Every well-balanced, efficient nature must 
combine the differing traits here exposed in these 
sisters. 

This would be a very dull world without Martha. 
Its going forward would be very slow without those 
who take hold on life close to the earth and do 
the ordinary, commonplace things. Martha was 
not likely doing one unnecessary thing—certainly 
nothing improper. There was food to prepare, the 
house to set in order and many small duties that 
follow the obligations of hospitality. The routine 
things of life must be done. 


“Yes, Lord. Yet some must serve. 
Not all with tranquil heart 
At Thy dear feet, 
Wrapped im devotion sweet, 
May sit apart. 


“Ves, Lord. For man must earn, 
And woman make the bread; 
And some must watch 
And early wake for others’ sake 
Who pray instead.” 


We are in Martha’s debt. We enjoy a thousand 
blessings because Martha and those like her are 
willing to take responsibility for the commonplace 
duties and routine services that make these bless- 
ings possible. We are not blind to the peril of soul 


134 MARTHA AND MARY 


that threatens the overwrought ‘ fussy ” men and 
women who fill life exclusively with drudgery, and 
are weighted down solely with small things. We 
must pay tribute to Martha and to the people of 
this world who are willing to do these necessary, 
obscure, and monotonous things without which 
civilization, moral progress, and the best things of 
home life, school life and church life would be im- 
possible. There are thousands of details in the pro- 
gram of daily drudgery that people like Martha 
gladly undertake, without the doing of which the 
vision of the artist, architect and every lofty 
dreamer would not be realized. 
We need to remember with Longfellow that: 


“All common things—each day’s events 
That with the hour begin and end, 
Our pleasures and our discontents, 
Are rounds by which we may ascend. 


“We have not wings, we cannot soar, 
But we have feet to scale and climb 

By slow degrees, by more and more, 
The cloudy summits of our time.” 


Underneath every smoothly-running household is a 
willing Martha who has bent her back to the bur- 
den. Down below the outer signs of great business 
achievement and prosperity some sweating, tireless, 
devoted genius is always at work. Behind the 
pomp and glory of general and captain; behind the 
banners and martial music of every returning vic- 


MARTHA AND MARY 135 


torious regiment is the blood and suffering and 
brave fighting of unknown men. Under the domes 
of our great cathedrals, with their deans and 
bishops, behind the organized machinery of our 
churches, within the ranks of the far-flung mission 
lines, at the heart of all our philanthropies and re- 
forms, and under all plans of human redemption 
are to be found, obscured and withdrawn from 
public gaze and glamour, tireless, cross-bearing 
men of God, by whose living, serving, dying, these 
things rise and are maintained from age to age. 
The crowds praise with shouting the mounted 
leader of the host, or the captain of the enterprise, 
or the crimson-robed princes of the church, but 
God knows the man below, and God looks with par- 
ticular pleasure on the hidden lives of those who 
lift these leaders on their shoulders. We need the 
Marthas, and the sons of Martha, to make the 
world go on. 

We are indebted to Mary. Mary was what she 
was by reason of temperament. She doubtless had 
an aptitude for visions, and found her great delight 
in contemplating them. She had a spirituality that 
brought things of the other and higher world near. 
She was at home with Jesus and holy things. There 
may not have been any dislike of the irksome, hum- 
drum drudgery of life on her part. It is not neces- 
sary so to conclude. She knew what household 
cares meant and that things of a menial nature had 
to be done. We have no right to put Mary into a 


136 MARTHA AND MARY 


class of dreamy, impractical, ecstatic women to 
whom this present earthly life has no special in- 
terest. Mary simply had a quickened spiritual 
sense which her housework had not dulled. She 
had a feeling for God and Godlike things which 
gave these things of daily toil their proper place in 
her program. She would not neglect the kitchen, 
nor the duties of hospitality. She would simply 
take things in order. She saw beyond the kitchen. 
She had glimpses of great horizons wherein kitchen 
life was set, and she felt the call of those far hori- 
zons upon her soul just as much as she did the call 
of the kitchen. Every kitchen chore was good 
when Mary set it into its place in the scheme of 
God’s wider horizon. She felt none the less interest 
in the routine of Martha’s house because her soul 
had seen and taken hold on the vast themes of her 
Lord’s thought and work. Those who have seen 
beyond the day’s work, have seen something that 
puts a glory about the tiniest task they do. Those 
who have dreamed dreams have been those who put 
the spurs to the race and set goals before men that 
made life new and nobler for all. 

It was what Isaiah saw beyond the market-places 
of Jerusalem that inspired Israel to her best self. 
Columbus dreamed of a spherical earth and a sea 
track to India, and the fleets of the world spread 
their sails and followed his dream. Gutenberg 
dreamed of a printed Bible for everybody, and the 
world was made over again by what he saw. 


MARTHA AND MARY 137 


Luther saw a liberty of conscience and a new at- 
mosphere for the mind and heart of man, and what 
Luther saw beyond his cell wall turned Europe up- 
side down and changed the destiny of the race. 
William Carey was a good cobbler in Northampton 
and Leicester, but from his shop his heart went out 
to an unsaved world that did not know God, and he 
rose and went forth toward his dream, and Robert 
Morrison followed. So did Alexander Duff and 
Adoniram Judson, and Samuel J. Mills, and David 
Livingstone and a constantly growing army of 
missionaries. 

We shall not get to higher grounds in our own 
souls and the moral life of the world, unless there 
be those who by nature and capacity are fitted to 
wait for and receive the things of God, and show 
them to us and point us to the path by which we 
shall come up to them. 

Martha and Mary are two people without whose 
help the kingdom will falter in its progress, but 
they must work together. We must learn of them. 
We shall never be worth much in meeting the ever- 
lasting routine in the toil of life if at the same time 
we have not in us the native ability to sit down with 
Jesus and calmly share His holy feelings and vis- 
ions on behalf of men and God. We shall lose our 
efficiency in a world crowded with drudgery of de- 
tail if we let the years go by and we do not cultivate 
a spiritual hunger and a capacity for companion- 
ship with Jesus. Business men are laying plans for 


138 MARTHA AND MARY 


a dreary and comfortless old age when they live a 
busy, preoccupied life and neglect, till age cuts the 
nerves of power, to cultivate the ability to enjoy 
God and Godlike things, and to sit at ease when 
Jesus comes near. 

Unless we see visions from the busy desk today, 
we hinder our best at the desk as well as outside; 
unless we have fellowship with our great Guest, 
even while serving Him in the kitchen, we shall 
paralyse our ability to enjoy Him and all holy 
things. 

Unless we combine in us the power to see the big 
things and the willingness to do the little things, to 
meet Jesus in holy conversation and at the same 
time do our part to lift the burdens of the house- 
hold—unless spirituality goes hand in hand with 
practical service, we shall find life an empty, fruit- 
less thing, and our souls bereft of satisfaction. 


“No service in ttself is small; 
None great, though earth tt fill. 
But that ts small that seeks tis own, 
And great, that seeks His will. 


“Then hold my hand, most gracious God, 
Guide all my goings still; 
And let tt be my life’s own aim 
To know and do Thy will.” 


ALT 


PRAYER 


“Lord, send Thy light. 
Not only in the darkest night, 
But in the shadowy, dim twilight, 
Wherein my strained and aching sight 
Can scarce distinguish wrong from right, 
Then send light. 


“ Teach me to pray. 
Not only in the morning gray 
Or when the moonbeam’s silver ray 
Falls on me, but at high noonday, 
When pleasure beckons me away, 
Teach me to pray.” 
—ConsTANcE MiuMAN. 


“Why, therefore, should we do ourselves this wrong 
Or others—that we are not always strong; 
That we are ever overborne with care; 
That we should ever weak or heartless be, 
Anxious or troubled, when with us 1s prayer, 
And joy and strength and courage are with Thee?” 
—FRENCH. 


“As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod, 
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God; 
I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies 
In the freedom that fills all the space ’twixt the marsh 

and the skies; 
By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends m the 
sod— 
I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God.” 
—SIDNEY LANIER. 


XIT 


PRAYER 


“And Hezekiah received the letter of the hand of the 
messengers and read tt: and Hezekiah went into the 
house of the Lord and spread 1t before the Lord.’— 
II KIncs 19: 14. 


kE must not obscure the moral point of 
~ this text by any extended recital of 
¥/ the rapidly-moving events that sweep 
UVR across its background. However, they 
are too interesting to pass. In all the dramatic 
periods of Jewish history there is none more astir 
with life, more thronged with passionate figures, 
more shadowed with sorrow, more filled with bit- 
terness and disappointment, than this particular 
one out of which the beautiful and impressive inci- 
dent of our text arises. 

Hezekiah is king of Judah. He has fought to 
keep the people of his kingdom free and indepen- 
dent. Sennacherib, with his Assyrian troops, has 
swept the land of Syria. Its cities have fallen. 
The glorious cedars of Lebanon have been burned, 
and the iron heel of the tyrant is on all the land. 
Sennacherib is on his way to Egypt to drain its 
canals and take tribute of its grain and gold. On 


141 





142 PRAYER 


his victorious progress through Syria, hilltop after 
hilltop has had to yield. All but the fortress of 
Zion have surrendered. Here, in the fortified city 
of Jerusalem, stands Hezekiah. The tidal wave of 
Assyrian power is rushing on. At last Sennacherib 
sets up his sculptured throne on the ruins of a 
nearby city of Judah and writes a letter to Heze- 
kiah, picturing to him the horror of his fate, if he 
refuses to yield. The letter is sent by the hand of 
the chief of staff, who is accompanied by a pom- 
pous retinue. It was a bold, contemptuous and 
peremptory letter. It reeked with blood. 

While the written word was being carried into 
the presence of Hezekiah, the message was being 
noisily delivered from the hill slopes to the terrified 
people by loud-voiced messengers. ‘The throne- 
room was in a panic. Hezekiah’s secretaries tore 
their garments in shreds as they handed the letter 
of doom. A few hours only and the Assyrian wolf 
would descend upon them. Judah would be as the 
city of Lachish and as Damascus and as the smok- 
ing ruins of Ephraim. Even now the scarlet-clad 
horsemen stand before the gates of Jerusalem. 
The chariots and foot soldiers with red shields fill 
the ravines. The proudest regiment of archers in 
all ancient history is on the slopes. 

Midst the din and clamour of the warriors with- 
out and the strange indifference of the people 
within, Isaiah, on fire with indignation and full of 
indomitable hope, moves through the streets, chid- 


PRAYER 143 


ing, exhorting and pleading for faith and trust in 
Almighty God. It is a breath-taking moment, with 
the destiny of a kingdom in the balance. 

The next step of King Hezekiah becomes of 
world-wide importance. Under the trying circum- 
stances, what will he do? Will the cabinet be 
called? Will the court constabulary be sum- 
moned and sent like frenzied messengers through 
the highways to arouse the people? What is the 
next gesture due from this chief character in 
the drama? 

The text tells. ‘‘ And Hezekiah received the let- 
ter of the hand of the messengers.”’ He did the 
most courteous and natural thing. He read it. 
And now his next step in the midst of the national 
tragedy is most impressive. ‘“‘ And Hezekiah went 
into the house of the Lord and spread it before the 
Lord.” It is this significant action of Hezekiah 
that commands attention. 

We now forget the haughty messengers on the 
hilltop and the vast hordes of Sennacherib waiting 
his command. King Hekeziah, on his knees in the 
Temple, with the outspread letter before him, talk- 
ing to God about it, is the main feature in the 
landscape. 

In this dramatic situation we locate several les- 
sons about the place and power of prayer in a 
man’s life. With Hezekiah’s example in the back- 
ground, we may conclude that: The spreading of 
our difficulties before the Lord, as Hezekiah spread 


14:4 PRAYER 


his letter, is a sure approach to that mental poise 
which should be ours when we face emergencies. 

This dazed and perplexed king went to his knees 
with what seemed to be the death-knell of his king- 
dom ringing in his ears. Affairs could not be worse. 
Cabinet officers were frenzied. Secretaries were 
panic-struck. Hezekiah was at his wit’s end. 
Minutes were like hours. To a thousand questions 
there was no answer. And with his brain buzzing 
with contradictory and impossible things, his heart 
surging with indescribable feelings, he turns aside, 
seeks the quiet shadows of the Temple altar and 
there spreads the whole confused and terrible situ- 
ation before the Lord. This was the sure pathway 
to peace as blazed by a perplexed king. 

When the brain is racked with the pressure of 
unsolved problems and all about are the spear- 
points of hostile forces making progress impossible, 
what are men who believe in God to do? They are 
to seek some quiet sanctuary into which to carry 
the puzzled and outwitted intellect. They are to 
go aside and spread their troubles before God. 
Amidst the intruding and disturbing things that 
spoil our peace and imperil our daily efficiency, 
there is an intellectual calm and a mental poise that 
is to be found nowhere in all the world except in 
the noiseless corridors of prayer. People have yet 
to fully realize the supreme contribution to rest, 
peace, poise, power, that is born of this act of Heze- 
kiah when shutting his ears to the war-trumpets at 


PRAYER 145 


his besieged city gates he went alone into the sepa- 
rated and sanctified spaces of the sanctuary and 
knelt down before the Lord. 

Perplexed and dazed men must take their 
clouded minds into the clarifying atmosphere of 
prayer. There is a calm that is waiting there that 
nothing can disturb, not even Sennacherib and all 
his gilded gentry in battle array at the gates. 
While they boast and wait, God’s man finds the 
only path that leads to mental poise in the emergen- 
cies of life. 

The second thing to be noted is, that praying 
before planning is Hezekiah’s program in an emer- 
gency. It would seem foolhardy to delay one mo- 
ment the appeal to defensive machinery when such 
a threatening situation overhangs. Hezekiah has 
been compelled to bargain for time with the Assy- 
rian generals. He paid them for their holding off 
in gold leaf from the Temple doors and a vast sum 
of money besides. Surely it is time to strike! If 
human wisdom is to guide, Hezekiah should call his 
staff about him, announce his battle plan, sound the 
war-horn and organize a grand sally. To wait an 
hour will give the haughty warriors that are so 
eager for blood the very chance they seek. It is 
action that is needed. Apparatus and enginery 
should be immediately appealed to. Committees 
should be called, schemes drafted, propaganda 
started, loans floated, commissary organized, all 
the noisy, outward activities of war instantly 


146 PRAYER 


should be called forth. It is a supremely critical 
moment. But Hezekiah will make no plans until 
he prays. He believes that human lives and pur- 
pose must be directed of God, and that no man is 
ready or competent to act yonder in the visible 
world till he has taken counsel of the invisible. 

Hezekiah is far from being a visionary emotion- 
alist. He is simply a man who recognizes that he 
is a partner in two worlds. That he moves in one, 
by the power and direction of the other. He knows 
that machinery always comes second in the organ- 
ization of the supreme forces of life—that per- 
sonality, the spiritual equation in us, is greatest. 
He knows that personality is the inward and direct 
agent of God’s own life, the channel of His own 
power, the human area in which lies His own divine 
image. He knows that this supreme thing in us, 
with which God has fellowship and to which His 
will is made known and by which His purpose is 
accomplished, defies all outward enemies and 
baffles all external machinery. So before the pro- 
gram is made, Hezekiah puts his personality in 
sympathetic touch with its divine Creator, Com- 
rade and Counsellor. It was right and wise then; 
it is right and wise now. 

Men know what God wants, and how He feels 
and what His divine suggestions are. They should 
seek to harmonize themselves with Him as far as 
the quiet, receptive communicating moment we call 
prayer will make these things plain; then, with 


PRAYER 147 


ardour and skill and persistency set the machinery 
in motion. In their personal planning, men must 
not reverse the program. They must not be guilty 
of erecting the apparatus or setting up the machin- 
ery before they have the power plant. They must 
pray, then set the program. Spread the letter of 
the enemy before God, then call the military. 

Finally, we note that here was a man going into 
the spiritual world for reinforcements when the ma- 
terial world about him offered nothing but immedi- 
ate and certain defeat. 

Lord Northcliffe said, when the World War was 
at its height, that the thing on which we had to de- 
pend for victory lay in the realm of the “ imponder- 
ables.” The battleships, the Allied armies, the 
total machinery of war, all these things were second 
in importance to the “‘ imponderables.” The things 
that lived in the spiritual world, the invisible reali- 
ties of the moral life, the forces that fought and 
wrought in men’s souls. These things won the war. 
Without the invisible and the imponderable things 
of the soul, all war machinery would have been use- 
less junk. Hezekiah on his knees with Sennache- 
rib’s letter open before him, and the seething mass 
of hostile soldiery around him, knew that victory in 
that hour was to be determined by “ the imponder- 
ables.” He, therefore, in that hour when externals 
held no hope for him, deliberately appealed to the 
Commander-in-Chief over all the imponderables. 
We are all misled by the heresy that God is on the 


148 PRAYER 


side of the biggest guns. It is not true. He has 
never been, except when the biggest guns were on 
His side. History denies it. Daily experience con- 
tradicts it. God is not the God of apparatus or 
enginery, but God is a Spirit. His omnipotence 
moves through men’s souls and works when and 
where machinery fails. Therefore, in daily life, 
with its problems and perplexities, men must follow 
the practice of Hezekiah if they would find the 
source of victorious spiritual power and meet their 
material difficulties with spiritual forces. 

Cowper spoke the truth, to which men who pray 
gladly agree, when he said: 


“Prayer makes the darkened clouds withdraw, 
Prayer climbs the ladder Jacob saw; 
Gives exercise to faith and love, 
Brings every blessing from above. 
Were half the breath that’s vainly spent 
To heaven in supplication sent, 
Our cheerful song would oftener be, 
“Hear what the Lord hath done for me.” 


AITI 


OUR CHILDREN 


“We are all architects of Fate, 
Working in these walls of time: 
Some with massive deeds and great, 
Some with ornaments of rhyme. 
x * * * 
“ For the structure that we raise, 
Time is with material filled; 
Our todays and yesterdays 
Are the blocks with which we build. 
* * * * * 
“ Build today, then, strong and sure, 
With a firm and ample base; 
And ascending and secure 
Shall tomorrow take its place.” 
—LONGFELLOW. 


“The young child, Christ, is straight and wise, 
And asks questions of the old men; questions 
Found under running water for all children, 
And found under shadows thrown upon still waters 
By tall trees looking downward, old and gnarled, 
Found to the eyes of children alone, untold, 
Singing a low song in the loneliness. 
And the young child, Christ, goes asking, 
And the old men answer nothing and only know love 
For the young child, Christ, straight and wise.” 

—CarL SANDBURG. 


XIII 
OUR CHILDREN 


“For the promise is unto you and to your chil- 
dren.’—ACcTS 2: 39. 


“And took them up in his arms, put his hands upon 
them and blessed them.’—MarkK I0: 16. 


“A2~T is time for a sane and sympathetic 

s&) word about the children of today. It 

\ y ie § ought to come from the Christian pul- 

piss Ewes pit. It should represent the utterance 

of that appreciating group in which, for two thou- 

sand years, the child has found its only just and 

adequate interpretation and its proper treatment in 
relation to itself, society and God. 

Abnormal youth of today, with its precocity and 
mannerisms, is getting too much attention. The 
discussion of childhood and youth in our daily 
papers and magazines consists, generally, of a 
clever array of the obnoxious and forbidding things 
done by a few erratic and giddy children. The 
flippant fashion in which our young girls are 
discussed and classified, their dress minutely ana- 
lysed, their motives impugned and their eccentrici- 
ties magnified, has gone too far. The whole subject 
of modern girlhood is made the butt of unseemly 


151 





152 OUR CHILDREN 


gossip and cynical comment. Such wholesale tra- 
ducing of the tastes and character of our younger 
set of girls ought to call out from the chivalry of 
clean young men and from the loving pride of 
fatherhood indignant protests and honest, vigorous 
words of defense. It is time someone rose to differ- 
entiate and to insist-that one foolish child, one gro- 
tesquely garmented girl, one loud boy, no matter 
how much publicity may be accorded to them, shall 
not be allowed to misrepresent a whole generation 
of boys and girls. A group of foolish girls that 
smoke and play bridge for stakes, who dress in 
barbaric fashion and do barbaric things to make 
themselves attractive to boys on the street or at the 
dance parties, shall not be allowed to misrepresent 
a whole generation of respectable and restrained 
girls whose virtues and fine qualities find no recog- 
nition in the newspapers. 

These virtues and fine qualities are the ordinary 
things that prevail with our girls and call for no 
comment because they are so common and usual 
everywhere. The quiet, modestly clad, womanly 
girl goes by approved and without comment. But 
the girl, painted, powdered and coiffed and wearing 
the eccentric in clothes, is the subject of the sketchy 
talk and questionable interest. She is a weakling 
and her mild form of lunacy must not be allowed to 
cast suspicion on the sanity of all our girls. 

There are young boys, today, who have grown 
old in the undesirable ways of the world at seven- 


OUR CHILDREN 153 


teen, but they must not be permitted to put all 
other boys of the generation into the catalogue of 
the silly and the sinful, nor make us forget the 
thousands of clean, respectful and obedient boys 
that fill the homes and satisfy the hearts of parents 
all over this country. 

We must do our part to make intolerably ob- 
noxious the girls whose manners and conduct belie 
their whole generation. We must heap shame and 
ridicule on the boys who despise and violate clean 
and good things, including their homes and their 
mothers’ hearts and other boys’ sisters, but we 
must be fair and well-judged toward our boys and 
girls, knowing that the noisy and objectionable boy 
or girl are the ostentatious minority, not the whole 
group. Before we gloomily forecast the future, or 
prophesy the collapse of all our ideals for boys and 
girls, let us think through the situation into which 
this generation has been born. 

There are certain things which should be kept in 
mind when we talk about the children of today. 
Before we render our final judgment as to their 
being better or worse than we were at their age, 
we must recall two or three things. 

First: The children of today are in the act of 
responding to an entirely new and highly complex 
environment. They have come into an age of mir- 
acle without knowing it! The inventions and sci- 
entific achievements that took the breath of those 
of us who have memories, even but twenty-five 


154 OUR CHILDREN 


years long, are to the children of today the ordi- 
nary, matter-of-fact things of daily life. I saw the 
first street-car propelled by electricity, running by 
fits and starts, in the grounds of the Columbian 
Exposition. Riding on it was so novel and unbe- 
lievable a sensation that passengers waved to the 
spectators in an amused and self-conscious way. I 
saw the first telephone that came into Southern In- 
diana during my freshman year at college, and 
when it was to be officially opened, none of the 
amazed student group present in the post-office 
knew enough to laugh when the president began to 
“hello” into the receiver rather than into the 
transmitter. The first horseless carriage made its 
precarious progress through the streets of Kokomo, 
Indiana, amidst the scoffing of boys who are but 
now approaching middle life. The incandescent 
light displaced the kerosene lamp and the illumi- 
nating gas, but a few years ago. I sent my first 
Marconigram, seventeen years ago, from the S. S. 
“‘ Cedric,” to friends on the S. S. “‘ Carmania,” both 
in mid-ocean and two hundred miles apart. It was 
an achievement of which to boast. The efforts of 
Chanute, Maxim, Langley, and the brothers Wright 
to construct a flying machine was for us of the 
older generation properly caricatured in “ Darius 
Green and His Flying Machine.” The submarine 
was a dream impossible, except for Jules Verne, till 
ten years ago. The moving-picture film, perhaps 
the most influential thing in modern times, is an 


OUR CHILDREN 155 


invention almost contemporaneous with our fifteen- 
- year-old boys. 

The wireless telephone, a marvellous, well-nigh 
uncanny discovery, is the home toy of boys today. 
In every realm of life, time and space have been 
practically eliminated. The developments in the 
mechanical and scientific world have been more 
notable since I was born, and I am a middle-aged 
man, than during the past 2,000 years. All life, 
thereby, has gone into a higher pitch. 

Into this age of marvels these children are born 
and by them these epoch-making discoveries and 
inventions are accepted without amazement, or 
even surprise, as an obvious part of the ordinary 
life. This whole indescribable setting of our ma- 
terial civilization has forced this generation of chil- 
dren into an inevitable precocity. It has forever 
banished the old-time simplicity of life in home, 
school, work and play. 

To this new environment that is beyond any man 
to describe, our children are now responding. Of 
course, it affects the present generation fundamen- 
tally, affects tastes, ambitions, studies and aims in 
life. It is no wonder that many a youth is swept 
from his feet as he comes into the complexity of 
this environment and undertakes to respond to it. 
It is a test, intellectual and moral, that is challeng- 
ing the tenacious qualities even of matured men! 
Under it, youth is sure to break in regrettable in- 
stances of misbehaviour. Self-assertion and inde- 


156 OUR CHILDREN 


pendence inevitably are bred in the effort of our 
children to meet the call of such stimulating sur- 
roundings. Poise and courage and a daring that 
qualifies youth for aviation—the most daring enter- 
prise of all time—are born of this effort to respond 
to the new facts of our day. 

Another thing always to be eh in mind when 
trying to arrive at a just judgment on our children, 
is, that they have come into an era of preoccupied 
parenthood. This new environment to which par- 
ents also have undertaken to respond has started 
some amazing reactions in parents’ lives. It has 
wrought definite changes in the character of home 
life. Civilization has put a great burden on good 
people. It has quickened their understanding of 
human needs and their appreciation of the value of 
truth and service for mankind; also it has devel- 
oped a sense of oughtness in all good men and 
women from which they cannot escape without loss 
of self-respect and disregard of their conscience. 
Fathers and mothers in whose souls the highest and 
holiest impulses of a Christian civilization have 
flowered and fruited, are those whose leadership 
and co-operation have made possible the achieve- 
ments in the realms of philanthropy and unselfish 
service. It is the motherhood of the nation that 
knows how to organize and administer orphanages, 
day nurseries and child welfare work. It is the 
fatherhood of the nation that builds and directs the 
hospitals, the asylums and reform schools. It is 


OUR CHILDREN 157 


the builders of homes and the sympathetic spirit of 
the family that maintain homes for dependent chil- 
dren, aged and infirm. It is out of the hearts of 
Christian parenthood that a tidal wave of love for 
lost men, women and children goes forth to the 
benighted corners of the earth. 

There is a centrifugal passion born of the loving 
ingredients that meet and merge in every true 
home. It is the outgo of that passion that is saving 
the world. 

This being said, it must be further remarked that 
other less worthy and positively undesirable con- 
ditions have wrought to explain this present pre- 
occupied situation of modern parenthood. The 
economic grind preoccupies the father, the social 
and club program occupies the mother. The selfish 
things of the lodge, of golf, of the theatre and of 
travel, all work to break the continuity of parental 
contact and insulate parents from their children. 
At no point is civilization the gainer if men and 
women preoccupied and distracted, save, as it were, » 
a whole world, and then lose their own family. We 
need not look very deeply to be made aware of the 
fact that the old unity of the household is gone. It 
was possible, twenty-five years ago. The evening 
hour is no longer the holy hour of happy oneness, 
but the signal for a general scattering all over the 
county. Children are being affected in character 
and conduct as well as in their own ideals of home 
life for the future by this era of preoccupation in 


158 OUR CHILDREN 


which parents are programming and propagating in 
the interests of the great whole while practically 
losing their grip on the precious part of that whole 
which God specifically gave into their care. 

Then, too, it should be remembered that the 
children of today are repressed and dwarfed by a 
system of secularized education. There is some- 
thing in every child bigger than his mind that needs 
to be liberated by his schooling. Wise teachers 
always go for that thing, whether the system under 
which they teach provides for it or not. Boys and 
girls are repressed and their noblest powers piti- 
ably inhibited when they pass through their school 
period and no one opens for them the doorway 
through which their souls can pass toward God in 
a definite acknowledgment of Him and in a devo- 
tion of life to His service. It is this fatal repression 
of the moral nature of our children by a secularized 
system of education that is arousing not only 
thoughtful citizens but also the leaders in our edu- 
cational work. Our schools must introduce a moral 
instruction that will not leave denatured the spiri- 
tual life of our children. The bleak, barren souls 
of boys and girls bereft of moral ideas and deprived 
of a sense of God cry out all over this nation for 
His direction and companionship. We have been 
so unwise as to believe that we could not disassoci- 
ate morals and religion from a sectarianism that 
would violate a principle of our government. We 
must free ourselves of that misunderstanding be- 


OUR CHILDREN 159 


fore we are paganized. We must realize how 
essential to our stability as a social, political and 
economic national group is the planting of a moral 
sense in the heart life of our youth. 

The dishonesty of boys in positions of trust, the 
story of hardened criminals at eighteen years of 
age, the loose and shocking conduct of girls sur- 
prisingly young and tender, drive home the unes- 
capable duty of lodging at the source of all conduct 
a definite sense of God and moral oughtness. We 
must not be asked to pay for our cherished prin- 
ciple of separation of church and state a cost price 
that involves the dwarfing of our children in their 
moral growth and the aborting of their spiritual 
faculties. 

Every good public school teacher seeks to cir- 
cumvent this calamity by methods open to all sym- 
pathetic and spiritually enlightened workers. But 
to meet adequately the crisis of a secularized sys- 
tem of education and save to our children their 
spiritual heritage, the Church must rise and do her 
part. The week-day school of religion is coming 
to the help of our day school teachers who see this 
fatal lack in our public school system. Week-day 
religion under fine organization is at work in many 
places. Children gather in churches under pas- 
tors and other religious teachers for ninety minutes 
twice a week for more moral instruction in a year 
than they now get in ten years of the Sunday- 
school. Here is a responsibility the churches no 


160 OUR CHILDREN 


longer can avoid. The centre of the child’s life 
must be spiritualized! Moral ideals must be 
planted in the tender soul of childhood or not at all. 

We have, today, the most gifted and potential 
boys and girls the world ever saw. They are re- 
ceptive of the good, they are hungry for leadership 
in the right. They call for a sympathetic, construc- 
tive, liberating program that will put body, mind 
and spirit into subjection to the ideals of Jesus, 
including a task commensurate with their conscious 
powers. 


ALV 


RAIN ON THE GRASS 


“The stars come nightly to the sky; 
The tidal wave unto the sea; 
Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high, 
Can keep my own away from me.” 
—JOHN BurroucHs. 


“Lord, who walked upon the sea, 
Is it you who pass 
Softly in the grass 
When a little wind blows over 
Scarcely bending down the clover? 


“Is this robe of blooming yours 
Spread across the field 
That its hem has healed 
Suddenly my bitter heart 
With a virtue passing art?” 
—Hr11pa Morris. 


XIV 
RAIN ON THE GRASS 


“Fle shall come down like rain upon the mown 
grass.” —PSALM 72:6. 


B the farm, the vocabulary of this text 
& has always made a special appeal. 
+&) There is an agricultural flavour to it 
that one easily recognizes. I knew the meadow in 
the glory of its late June ripeness and hold its fra- 
grance to this day as an unforgettable memory. 
The literary charm of the Old Testament passages 
is often due to their being saturated with the at- 
mosphere of field and meadow. The authors of the 
New Testament were principally city born, and 
men with no knowledge of land husbandry. There 
were no ancestral pastures, no landed possessions, 
no flocks and herds on the hills of their clans, 
that could give colour to their narrative, as in 
the case of the prophets and poets of their Pales- 
tinian forbears. 
But I confess to have carried in my heart 
through all my childhood an aversion to this text. 
It never fell pleasantly upon my ears. Living 


163 





164 RAIN ON THE GRASS 


among the meadows, I knew the unseasonableness 
of rain in haying time. There were many moments 
of panic in my father’s meadows as rain came. 
The new-mown grass lay sweet and odorous, 
curing in the sun. It was a critical moment in 
the process that changes the grass to hay. The 
meadow needed warm, drying winds and unbroken 
sunshine. The most undesirable thing in the his- 
tory of cutting and curing hay, was rain. It spoiled 
its edibility for winter feeding and blighted its col- 
our, taking away also its flavour and perfume. I 
never saw in this text any aspect of God which, to 
us on the farm, was agreeable and to be admired. 
I did not like to think of Him as coming down like 
rain on mown grass. 

But the correction came with later understand- 
ing. My prejudices were entirely due to ignorance. 
When the hay was cut, cured and snugly stored for 
use during the long, hungry days of winter, and 
when the July showers, warm and plenteous, fell on 
the short cropped grass, a fresh green quickly 
spread over the meadow’s deadness like the har- 
binger of another springtime. The rain reached 
after, found and brought back the ebbing life of 
those dry roots and laid another colour on the field 
with the cheering promise of a second growth. A 
new flood of life was poured out on a dying field 
and wrought a miracle. Then I saw the meaning 
of our Bible poet. 

God, to him, was like the reviving rain on the 


RAIN ON THE GRASS 165 


withered roots of mown grass. This man of the 
sheep pasture closed his eyes and saw a withered 
meadow, exhausted, fruitless, ruined, reviving 
under a sweet warm shower. It symbolized for 
him God’s love. 

Now, let us move out of the cut meadows and 
into men’s hearts. Like the meadow, they may be 
dry, sapless, unpromising, needing rain. The poet 
here says that God’s life, so real, vital and eager, 
falls upon the dead areas of men’s spiritual lives 
like showers upon the new-mown grass, and even 
though that life be ebbed or ebbing, it comes again 
and verdure soon spreads athwart the bare, brown 
field and all things are made new again. 

You note that it was mown grass upon which the 
rain fell. Grass of the ebbed and aborted life. Its 
beauty and sweetness had gone and its growth was 
done. The vital currents had stopped. A meadow 
which ordinarily was a joy of the earth—a rich, 
growing thing—a nesting-place for birds, a feeding- 
place for hungry cattle, is now but a stretch of 
utter deadness. Meadows die? Yes. Verdure 
fade? Yes. Where once waved growing grass, 
blight and deadness come. 

So with men’s hearts, until, like the gentle rain, 
He comes down. Until my heart recognizes and 
feels the life of God flowing into it and responds to 
that life, as do the worn and sere blades of grass in 
the summer meadows to the shower, there is no real 
joy or power in life. Nothing revives hearts and 


166 RAIN ON THE GRASS 


gives peace and power to life like the quickening 
showers of God. People do not always believe this 
statement. They go searching for other sources of 
life’s verdure to beautify the parched meadow of 
their souls. 

Is it possible for enthusiasm for purely intel- 
lectual achievements to refresh the heart and revive 
the soul as showers of rain revive the meadows? 
It never does. It never will. Yet hungry lives and 
empty souls often appeal for reviving only to intel- 
lectual things. There is a subtle kind of unspiri- 
tualizing selfishness in the mere intellectual joys of 
life. Intellectual pursuits may be idle and profit- 
less, even poisonous for the soul. People somehow 
or other feel virtuous when they go out on intel- 
lectual excursions. ‘They feel they are en route to 
that which blesses and makes men rich. Intel- 
lectual pursuits are of inestimable value, but things 
of literature and history and logic cannot feed the 
deeper yearnings of the soul and must not be ex- 
pected to do so. Intellectual pursuits do revive the 
heart when they are spiritualized and glorified and 
sanctified by unselfish motives. Otherwise they, 
too, bind heart and life into zones of littleness and 
selfishness that taint and poison the spiritual life. 
I have yet to see life made over again with its sor- 
rows and sin in its conscious emptiness and fruit- 
lessness by the refreshing showers of a man’s own 
thinking. 

Art is blessing the world with a wonderful min- 


RAIN ON THE GRASS 167 


istry. There is a chastening and beautifying re- 
action in the soul that follows a man’s contact with 
art in any of its higher forms and phases. But 
have you ever seen art working for its own sake, 
alone and detached, refresh and renew the lifeless 
meadows of the heart? Art, when sanctified by 
motives of service, brings a joy into life that satis- 
fies. Lorado Taft, the sculptor, again and again 
has said that he finds his joy in working solely to 
help men see life and know it more and more. But 
some of the most unhappy lives in history have 
been those devoted to the noblest things of the art 
world. Art may be a selfish enthusiasm that be- 
littles and spoils a man’s larger and nobler life. 
One of the greatest architects of America has left 
a name we hardly mention in good company with- 
out an apology. Art works its miracles of spiritual 
beauty. Daniel H. Burnham was one of the great- 
est constructive architects of his generation. And 
no man has left a more enduring monument than 
Mr. Burnham in the great masterpieces of civic 
reconstruction that have altered city building for 
all time and in all parts of the civilized world. Art 
was his servant, not his master. Art releases won- 
derful ideals in marble and bronze, in music and 
poetry, but even art in its ministry among men does 
not fall to the roots of our human needs and, like 
the soft, reviving rains, reach and satisfy the wait- 
ing hunger that is there. Something other must 
be had. 


168 RAIN ON THE GRASS 


Will philanthropy come down like rain on the 
mown grass? ‘There is a species of philanthropy 
that I have seen bearing the outward marks of that 
unselfish serving that fills life with spiritual joy 
and satisfaction, yet it is accompanied by the most 
bitter and cynical spirit toward the wrongs and in- 
adequacies of society. It carries into the slums, 
with its enthusiasms for tabulations and surveys, a 
heart that spoils its outlook toward God and the 
whole human race. The pursuit that ordinarily is 
sure to bring joy and peace seems to start daily 
new revolts and wake new voices of pessimism. 
This mock altruism with its unhappy heart may 
find facts to record and figures to tabulate, but it 
will never find spiritual joy in service. The heart 
of such a philanthropist will lie like the dead 
meadow till there be opened into it an entrance for 
the life and spirit of God. Then will come a new 
joy-giving point of view in his work. Then hope 
and constructive enthusiasm will replace cynicism 
and despair. 

We come back to the Psalmist’s suggestion that 
our hearts are like the meadows, mown and void, 
waiting the reviving showers of God’s own life. It 
is to our advantage to recognize this fact. The 
outlook on the race is not hopeful apart from the 
redemptive plans of Almighty God. There are 
facts that give us pain as we study the hearts of 
men, if we for one moment forget the impending 
showers from the overarching skies of God’s love. 


RAIN ON THE GRASS 169 


Here is where we root our hope in the final triumph 
of the good. 

“God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the 
world.” The dead and dried fields of godless liv- 
ing are stretching out on every side. They teem 
with millions of parched, unfruitful hearts of dis- 
satisfied men. Athwart those fields like some blight 
that stays their wonderful possibilities, sin has 
gone. It aborts life. It spoils growth. It mars 
hope. It makes no difference whether a man lives 
in a mansion in the light and glory of a great mod- 
ern city or in a grass hut in the brutalities of an 
African jungle, the blight works toward the same 
end and the reviving power must come from the 
same source,—out from the hills of God! 

But here is the promise. ‘“ He shall come down 
like rain upon the mown grass.” No great yearn- 
ing for more abundant life ever stirred a heart to 
cry out for Him but that He came down. ‘Oh 
God, give me Scotland or I die,” said the great 
praying Reformer as he looked over his bleak 
meadow, and God came down and stamped a re- 
ligious character upon the Scottish people, unparal- 
leled outside of the Hebrew race. He kindled in 
their hearts a love for the Scriptures that two hun- 
dred and fifty years of changing world conditions 
have not quenched. He bestowed a kind of in- 
spired gift for religious thinking in their minds, 
unmatched in any other men, and Scotland has 
gone on, from that day to this, shaping the spiritual 


170 RAIN ON THE GRASS 


life and destiny of the world by her preachers and 
missionaries. 

Jonathan Edwards, John and David Brainerd 
and George Whitefield saw a dead meadow in the 
hard, rude conditions of American life. It was as 
trying a spiritual dearth as ever broke the heart of 
God’s people. They cried out for the rain upon 
the parched grass of primitive American life. They 
waited on God in prayer and pointed people to their 
sins as well as their Saviour. They saw at last 
the showers come down and this land was so richly 
refreshed that men are living, today, on the spiri- 
tual fruitage of those gracious revivings of early 
years. He will come down like rain on the dry 
heart if men want Him. He will fill their needy 
souls with a glow and fervour that mean power. 
Men’s souls need rain. Roots of godly living are 
parched. Poor, withered hearts are waiting. And 
when the showers come, verdure returns again and 
a new life gladdens our spiritually drooping souls. 


XV 


THE WILL TO WIEL 


“Grant us the will to fashion as we feel, 
Grant us the strength to labour as we know. 
Grant us the purpose, ribb’d and edged with steel, 
To strike the blow. 
Knowledge we ask not—knowledge Thou hast lent, 
But, Lord, the will—there lies the bitter need: 
Give me to build above the deep intent 
The deed, the deed.” 
—JOHN DRINKWATER. 


“ Lord Jesus, who would think that I am Thine? 
Ah! Who would think, 
Who sees me ready to turn back and sink, 
That Thou art mine? 
I cannot hold Thee fast, though Thou art mine: 
Hold Thou me fast 
So earth shall know at last and Heaven at last 
That I am Thine!” 
—CHRISTINA RossETti. 


“ Self-orphaned by my will— 
* * * * * 
And willing to hate good and to hate love, 
And willing to will on so evermore, 


Scorning the past and damning the to-come.” 
—ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 


XV 
THE WILL TO WILL 


“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets 
and stoneth them that are sent unto thee: how often 
would I have gathered thy children together as a hen 
doth gather her brood under her wings and ye would 
not.”—LUKE 13: 34. 


BE cod is a magnificent endowment that 
; God gives every man, which we call a 
9 free will. Lying within this endow- 
Moe oy 4 ment is the power to negative the very 
penitence of God Himself. It is this disposition 
and capacity for the “ would not” in every man, 
that makes the pathetic and baffling situation 
represented in the text. 

This question is at once in order. “ If God really 
wishes His way with puny little men, and if His 
way is best, and if He is omnipotent, why does not 
God have His way with men?” “When He 
knows what is best for men in the light of ultimate 
good and when He knows the free choice of men 
actually runs counter to that good, why does He 
not step in with His preventing grace and coerce 
the choice of His children? Then would they 
never choose the wrong but always take the 


173 





174 THE WILL TO WILL 


right?’ These questions bring back the time- 
honoured discussion of divine sovereignty and free 
will to which our fathers gave so much pulpit atten- 
tion sixty years ago. Avoiding the academic and 
technical side of the subject, let us face the prac- 
tical issues involved in the question, ‘‘ Does God 
Almighty not get things done in men’s hearts, when 
and where and as He pleases? ” 

It should be kept in mind that God was shut up 
to one of two alternatives in creating man. Either 
He had to bestow upon man that marvelous gift of 
freedom of his will, carrying with it the power of 
choice and the moral responsibility that goes with 
choosing, or else He had to create him a manikin 
with no freedom, no initiative, simply a human 
machine, governed from outside of itself and 
capable of assuming no responsibility of choice. 
The first alternative with the power of free choice 
and a liberty to say, “no,” with a capacity for 
moral initiative, (a feature of God’s own char- 
acter) was the only alternative that an intelligent 
omnipotence could possibly allow in the vast ma- 
terial cosmos He had created. So the splendid 
endowment of free will came. Given to man the 
freedom of his will, permit him to pick and choose 
as he wishes amidst the good and bad, and you have 
opened the road toward God-likeness and moral 
perfection on one hand, and the road toward the 
moral ruin that wilfulness and the power of making 
the wrong choice always bring, on the other hand. 


THE WILL TO WILL 175 


A man cannot be free in his will to choose and 
at the same time be coerced and guided by 
someone outside. It is easy to see how God, 
having created us as He has, and knowing that 
moral character comes only through the power of 
free choice in the presence of both bad and good, 
must let men move as they will in a world organ- 
ized as this is. 

There is a glory and a majesty in this divine 
bequest of freedom that crown us with God-like 
possibilities. It would thrill all men were they led 
to appreciate the nobility and high honour which 
this God-like quality of free choice confers. In this 
matter we walk on a plane with God Himself. We 
assume authority and responsibility that are native 
to Him. This is the culminating feature in our 
creation separating us from the animal world like 
an ocean separates continents. This power of 
choosing, this willing to do or not to do, to say 
“yea” or “nay,” this unfettered liberty of the 
soul that chains and bars cannot confine, that God 
Himself cannot compel—this is a true quality of 
divine likeness. 

Old Confucius said, ‘‘ The general of a large 
army may be defeated, but you cannot defeat the 
determined mind of a peasant.” This is the finest 
achievement in nature, this acting, willing, choos- 
ing man, doing, saying, being what he will. 

We turn to the other side of the question that is 
pathetically revealed in our text. Jesus stood on 


176 THE WILL TO WILL 


the shoulder of the Mount of Olives and looked 
down upon a great city where, complacent and self- 
determined in their wilful disregard of Him and 
His teaching, sat the people most highly endowed 
spiritually of any race in history. Realizing the 
tragic use these spiritually endowed people had 
made of their liberty, and in sorrow, weeping, He 
said, ““O Jerusalem, how often would I have 
gathered thee as a hen gathers her chickens under 
her wings—but ye would not.” It is this inherent 
ability to outwit the loving purposes of our Lord, 
and thus, in suicidal fashion work the spiritual ruin 
of ourselves as a people, that now blinds the eyes 
of Jesus with tears. He is sadly aware of the fact 
that He looks down upon a splendid city where 
ceremony and ritual have smothered the spiritual 
life of the nation and where moral initiative in 
priest and people is dead. It is this capacity for 
opposition on the part of the human will to the 
plans and purposes of God that shuts men into nar- 
rowness, unspirituality and fruitless living. To 
man has been given this noble faculty that through 
it he might rise toward God. ‘The pathos of the 
situation lies in the fact that that which could be a 
supreme faculty through which God’s life might 
enter his own soul, man uses to shut God out of 
his life. 

In the presence of limitless spiritual power, 
man’s supreme need is the willing will! In the 
fourth stanza of “In Memoriam,” Tennyson 


THE WILL TO WILL rh 


recognizes the fact of our personal freedom and the 
moral obligation it imposes, when he says 


“Our wills are ours, we know not how; 
Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.” 


It has long been considered facetious and clever 
to travesty the doctrinal statement that this world 
and everything in it was predetermined and irre- 
vocably fixed by the will of an infinite God! The 
doctrine involved in this field of discussion as it is 
particularly related to the salvation of men, is 
called the doctrine of election. During the long 
controversy, this doctrine was bitterly assailed as 
utterly negating man’s free will and making per- 
sonal choice impossible. But the wisest contro- 
versialists have never succeeded in establishing a 
middle ground of agreement. 

There are interesting and gifted people whose 
wills unconsciously are preventing that fuller en- 
trance of God’s life into their souls. They do not 
deliberately plan to set their wills in opposition to 
His, nor in any way to prevent a richer inflowing 
of spiritual life into their souls. But the effect 
wrought by indifference, or premeditation, is the 
same. They are like many of the people drifting 
through art galleries. They have impulses toward 
the things that have brought them across the 
threshold of the building. They know they ought 
to love such things as are there, since they are 
among the world’s chief treasures of beauty. They 


178 THE WILL TO WILL 


know that good pictures liberate souls and set men 
free from the dull, clogging things that hold them 
down. So they enter and walk aimlessly through 
the corridors where the world’s masterpieces hang. 
But the will to absorb these great themes of art, to 
inhale the atmosphere that fills those noble corri- 
dors is not theirs. They are conscious of a shallow 
pleasure in the presence of the beautiful and per- 
haps a satisfaction that all feel when doing the 
right thing. But with their will inert and flabby 
and with a mental purpose indefinite, if not idle, 
they pass by Inness and Corot and Troyon and 
Meissonier. ‘They walk where immortal genius 
has spread the visions of its soul and nothing goes 
out from their wills, no vital, eager desire, to take 
hold of what they see. The corridors finally tra- 
versed, they pass out and forget the glories that are 
never to die. 

People, through long habit or coerced by social 
custom, go to church. They hear the Bible read, 
prayers offered, hymns sung, sermons preached. 
They listen, they approve, they feel a certain in- 
definite satisfaction like the people of the art 
galleries. But in no way do they send their active, 
eager wills out toward the truth they hear or 
toward the duty and moral obligation suggested by 
the things they hear. Without the active, willing 
will, nothing comes. 

But there are those who are deliberately indiffer- 
ent to the things of God. They plan not to have a 


THE WILL TO WILL 179 


live, personal interest in spiritual matters. They 
do not wish to will, where it involves sacrifice and 
service. They are not of those who get under 
the burdens of people or take tasks that run 
athwart their own personal desires. They avoid 
duties and irksome cross-bearing. They find slight 
but innumerable and successful excuses for declin- 
ing to do that which they do not wish to do because 
it takes moral initiative and some degree of sacri- 
fice of personal comfort and convenience. Jesus 
stands over against these unwilling people who 
have the power of choice and use it to serve selfish- 
ness, and I hear Him say, “‘ Oh, indifferent people, 
who choose deliberately to make of no avail your 
Christian life, by your will, keeping God out of 
your souls and preventing a larger life of love from 
pouring out upon others, how often would I have 
filled your heart with joy and blessing and made 
you a spiritual power in helping others, but ye 
would not.” One hears that voice often today. 
There are tears of regret and unrequited love in 
every word. It is a case of divine omnipotence 
standing outside the door of the human will, unable 
to enter. Human personality is inviolable in God’s 
sight. He never enters until the door is opened 
for Him. 

Indifference keeps holy, life-giving things at a 
distance—as effectively as hostile unbelief. It 
shuts life into confines just as narrow and Christ- 
less as infidelity. It may be at times easier to find 


180 THE WILL TO WILL 


the open door of the will of a frank sceptic than 
that of a selfish, indifferent, nominal believer who 
may be a complacent church-member making 
nothing’ of his privileges or responsibilities. 

Men are not generally waiting for arguments. 
It is not generally more information they want, nor 
any further intellectual appeal. It is not so often 
something in the mind that keeps Christ at a dis- 
tance. It is the ‘ will to will.” It is simply that 
men have not reached the point where Christ 
means so much to their life that they are willing to 
will that He shall come in and take the supreme 
place and control their lives. And so He stands 
outside, this Almighty Saviour, with the love of all 
Heaven in His heart. He respects so completely 
the majesty of man’s liberty as a free agent, en- 
titled to do as he pleases, that He will not coerce 
his will nor force open the door of his heart. But 
He continues to stand at the threshold with an 
eternal pathos in His words, saying, ‘‘ How often 
and constantly would I—but ye would not.” “I 
am ready to make your life rich and strong for 
God—but ye will not.” “TI will put a joy and a 
spirit of loving service into your heart and send you 
out on errands of help—but ye will not.” And so 
the divine capacity given of God as a means to 
bring us into spiritual fellowship with Him, is exer- 
cised to keep Him at a distance. 


AVI 


GOD IN HIS WORLD 


“What though in solemn silence all 
Move round this dark terrestrial ball? 
What though nor real voice nor sound 
Amidst their radiant orbs be found? 
In reason’s ear they all rejoice, 
And utter forth a glorious voice; 
For ever singing as they shine 
‘The Hand that made us is divine?” 
—ADDISON. 


“TIT come in the little things, 
Saith the Lord: 
Yea! on the glancing wings 
Of eager birds, the softly pattering feet 
Of furred and gentle beasts, I come to meet 
Your hard and wayward heart, in brown bright eyes 
That peep from out the brake I stand confest. 
* * * * * 


I come in the litile things, 

Saith the Lord: 

My starry wings 

I do forsake, 

Love's highway of humility to take: 

Meekly I fit my stature to your need. 

In beggar’s part 

About your gates I shall not cease to plod— 

As man, to speak with man— 

Till by such art 

I shall achieve my Immemorial Plan, 

Pass the low lintels of the human heart.” 
—EVvELYN UNDERHILL. 


XVI 
GOD IN HIS WORLD 


“In the beginning God created the heaven and the 
earth.”—GENESIS I: I. 









Sealey 
“( SE) a stupendous Mea aticn of animal, 
ey) YO vegetable, and mineral matter, and 
a, nothing more. They marvel at the 
Petar of life in man and at the subtle instinct of 
bird and beast. They grow ecstatic over the beauty 
and glory of the spectacle of the vegetable world in 
its career from bloom to fruit, they see epochs and 
ages of limitless time in the rocks and metal veins 
of earth. They look at the whole vast intricate 
moving-picture of nature, but they are so fascinated 
by the details of the picture that they do not see 
the original Producer, nor the plot and purpose that 
bind these details into unity. They see nothing 
behind or beyond the surface of the shifting, chang- 
ing film that carries before their eyes the vast pano- 
rama of the world. They see only that at which 
they look, no more. 
On the other hand, to the old Hebrew poets and 
to all men with spiritualized perceptions, God, the 
author, preserver and director of the world, is the 


183 


184 GOD IN HIS WORLD 


conspicuous and outstanding feature of every spec- 
tacle in nature. Such interpretative men look at the 
sky and sea and mountains and think of Him. 
They walk abroad at night and when the white 
stars shine upon them out of the Syrian skies or 
through the great telescopes of today, they think 
of Him. In the.violent storms and earthquakes 
they hear His voice. Looking at the brilliant 
beauty of the lilies in the fields and the waving 
corn on the hill slopes, they see Him. They see 
more than that at which they look. 

God should be set into the foreground of our 
thoughts as we watch the forces of nature, particu- 
larly in that indescribable period of activity we call 
Spring. We must not permit such a pageant of 
wonder to go by, and see only the trappings and 
external things that clothe Him who moves in the 
midst of it all. We must be alive to the very depths 
of our souls and highly sensitive to the signs and 
symbols that are all about. We must look quickly, 
ask questions promptly and draw conclusions truly 
but swiftly lest, before we become aware of the 
grandeur and the impressiveness of the moment, 
the scenes of spring and summer be shifted and we 
come again to the static spectacle of winter. 

In the first chapter of Genesis is the most im- 
pressive statement of God in relation to His world 
that has ever been committed to writing. It is not 
a story of which the microscope or the telescope 
were accessories. It is not the story of chemistry, 


GOD IN HIS WORLD 185 


nor geology, nor the statement of some spectro- 
scopist, nor physicist. It is the voice of an in- 
spired faith, speaking without a knowledge of the 
scientific facts, but in supreme confidence. The 
earth was flat to the man who penned Genesis in 
the darkness of that lost period of history in which 
he wrote. So far as he was concerned, there was 
no law of gravity holding in great orbits the worlds 
that swung about him. To him there was no 
science of astronomy that pierced the limitless 
spaces above him and revealed the interstellar 
secrets that our schoolboys know. There was no 
geology that laid bare the great facts beneath the 
surface of the earth, no chemistry that analyzed 
the atoms and disintegrated the ions. The man 
that wrote the record of Genesis did not need this 
data for his purpose. He had but one purpose. 
That purpose was fully stated in the first four 
words of Genesis, ‘‘ In the beginning, God.” 

Men who look so minutely into the material in- 
gredients of the universe and become so familiar 
with cosmic dust and hot nebule and cells and 
atoms and ions, sometimes suffer spiritual near- 
sightedness. Consequently, they do not see the 
spiritual intelligence and personal omnipotence out 
of which it has all come. They get so close to the 
dirt and dust of inorganic things and become so 
occupied with the fascinating movements of dead 
matter in the grip of law, that they have no in- 
clination to look beyond. This is an ever-present 


186 GOD IN HIS WORLD 


temptation of men dealing with the material facts 
and forces of the universe. But it is wrong to hold 
that scientific men are all agnostics and atheists. 
The laboratories, observatories and classrooms of © 
great scientists have been temples where God the 
Creator has been worshipped and His holy Name 
reverenced, a few notable exceptions to the con- 
trary notwithstanding. 

The way God made the universe, or the number 
of hours in His working days or the laws through 
which He operated, are utterly unimportant to our 
faith. We locate and define Him as the Creator 
and accord Him the right and the ability to make 
it as He pleases. 

There are three observations to be made under 
this general subject of the world and God: 

First: He made it. 

Second: He maintains it. 

Third: He holds its destiny in His hands. 

This takes care of yesterday, today and; tomor- 
row. We have no problems beyond these periods 
of time. 

In the first place, then: How glad we are that. 
man is not shut up to believe that he is a part of a 
dead world! We do not have to believe that the 
flow and counter-flow of inorganic, soulless matter, 
under impersonal cosmic laws or blind chance is all 
that life here is. If we felt that God was not, and 
that our life and world were simply responding to 
the resistless urge of blind laws coming out of 


GOD IN HIS WORLD 187 


nothing, moving by the will of nothing and passing 
again into nothing, one would feel that life was but 
a career of tragic cruelty by which men were im- 
posed on unfairly and without recourse or repara- 
tion. If there were no heart-throb in the pulsation 
of spring life, nor any signs or aims in the great 
stirring panorama passing before our eyes; if there 
were no reciprocation nor fellowship from birds or 
flowers or trees or skies or any of the great Spring 
and Summer facts; if we simply walked amidst it 
all, touching no heart, feeling the breath of no 
spirit, conscious of no benign hand, one should feel 
like a lifeless marionette dancing on a stage with 
other lifeless marionettes answering to the pull 
of invisible wires. Wooden things with wooden 
destiny. 

Any theory which fails to locate God as Creator 
leaves us in the loneliest, darkest and most unhappy 
world that can be thought of. There are some men 
whose faith does not serve them at this juncture. 
They are like explorers lost in impenetrable jungles 
without compass or trail. They are beaten and 
baffled by the prodigious mass of materials stand- 
ing about them, they cannot penetrate nor interpret 
the darkness, everything emphasizes their loneli- 
ness and proclaims their peril. They wait for a 
voice they do not hear, they look for a light that 
does not break, and daily life becomes to them a 
hopeless, embittered monotony, the end of which 
they covet. This is the stronghold of pessimism. 


188 GOD IN HIS WORLD 


It is a tragic, spiritual affliction of unfaith. Fail to 
figure God into the intricate fabric of the jungle, 
through your inability to accept in faith the fact of 
God in the universe, and you write the doom of all 
joy and peace in the human heart. We start where 
Genesis starts or the journey of life from the 
cradle to the grave is an unbroken, tantalizing, 
painful journey. God’s mind gave birth to the uni- 
verse and His hand wrought it. James Russell 
Lowell sang the heart’s true confession with the 
Genesis idea as a background when he said: 


“Through Thee, me seems, the very rose is red, 
From Thee the violet steals its breath in May, 
From Thee draw life all things that grow not gray 

And by Thy force the happy stars are sped.” 


The second observation has to do with God at 
work in His world today. He maintains it. He 
leaves the geological ages and operates in the vital 
present. We more easily give God credit for cre- 
ation in an infinitely remote period of time. It all 
seems so indefinite and chaotic and far off, that we 
will accept any theory that will leave Him in the 
process and get the work done. But it is a different 
situation that we confront when you hand me a 
grain of sand or a lilac bud or a thrush’s egg or a 
chemical formula for blood in my veins, or the di- 
mensions of Saturn and say, ‘“‘ where is thy God 
here and now? ” 

Is God in evidence in your springtime pageant? 


GOD IN HIS WORLD 189 


Are you only an imaginative poet weaving beautiful 
thoughts out of a fanciful brain and putting God 
here and law there and a great love everywhere? 

Are you insisting on something your hungry 
heart wants, that cannot be found in all this de- 
pressing, speechlessness of nature? Is your ra- 
diant faith saying, “‘ There He is.” ‘‘ Yonder He 
works.” “ This is His hand.” Do you see Him, 
today, and walk in fields and forests conscious 
of Him? 

Now that He started the enterprise and set the 
earth spinning down the grooves of time, we have a 
much less difficult task on hand to identify Him as 
the bountiful preserver and life-giving caretaker! 
Does the microscope show His trade-mark on 
flowers and fibre cells filled with rushing torrents 
of juicy sap? No. Does the blow-pipe find His 
name in the molten globules of minerals on the 
charcoal? No! Does the chemist find the Name 
of God wreathed in the gasses his laboratory dis- 
tills today? No! Where speaks His voice so 
that men recognize Him, today? In the strata of 
the rocks? No! In the restless tides? No! In 
the skies? No! “As it was in the beginning, is 
now, and ever shall be.’”’ As it was in Genesis in 
the remote morning of time, so it is in the revelation 
of God today. Faith in the presence of facts inter- 
prets Him as the original Creator and finds proof 
that confirms her belief. Faith today alone inter- 
prets Him as the bountiful daily preserver and 


190 GOD IN HIS WORLD 


director of all things. Nature is a wonderful guide, 
but inarticulate. She forms no words, frames no 
theories, propounds no theology. Faith simply 
takes the glorious, but speechless materials, the 
laws and instincts at work about her, and through 
them recognizes the loving hand, the constant and 
sustaining presence of God. Faith reads the signs 
at the roadside and she hopefully moves on. Those 
roadside signs point her happy feet in but one di- 
rection, and that is Godward. She hears a voice 
and sees a hand and feels a presence where ordi- 
nary human words are not vocal and where the 
sight of the eyes reveals nothing but footprints of 
one who has walked there and the ear hears simply 
echoes of someone who has certainly spoken! But 
to faith this is enough and she goes forward singing 
her oratorios of ‘‘ Creation” and her anthems of 
praise. 

But tomorrow is the baffling element in getting 
our universe on a reasonable basis. It is the un- 
certainty of destiny that chills our blood. We see 
the things of time and space melt away and vanish 
and we wonder and anxiously wait! The inevitable 
dissolution of all things seems to block our soul’s 
progress and shut the gate against our hope. We 
lay our loved one in the soft bosom of the earth 
just when we see signs of their beautiful unfolding. 
Fate goes crashing through the crowded ways of 
life and tramples down the forms of all living things 
just as ripeness and competency arrive to make 


GOD IN HIS WORLD 191 


them most worth-while. Nations crumble to dust 
while cities decay and are lost to history. Nothing 
is static or enduring. All things change and pass 
and fade. Is there no stability? No continuing 
order? No culminating destiny? “If so soon it 
be done, why was it begun? ” cries the man who 
lives only in this day and this world and sees doom 
written in every temporal thing! The woods break 
into colours, the glory of which no painter can 
catch! The hills are clad in a verdure that is con- 
stantly renewed. Fruit swings in the trees and 
flowers bloom in the mould. The forces of summer- 
time mobilize triumphantly in field and pasture. 
There are weeks of beautiful growing, a harvest of 
fruiting, then death and decay and the clearing of 
the stage for reacting the same old drama again 
next year! 

Is this all? Was this that for which we came 
forthe Does this satisfy the surging soul within 
us? Has faith a word that may here be spoken 
that will suggest a destiny, glorious and immortal 
out of dirt and decay? Yes! Faith sees the whole 
dissolving procession as it rises, moves through its 
little day—its springtime, its summer and autumn 
and as it is about to pass to death beneath the harsh 
heel of winter, says, ‘there is no winter in the 
calendar of the soul.” Everlasting Springtime is 
the destiny of immortal men. Under God, life is 
ever new and always. Its journey is never 
thwarted, its unfolding never halted. 


192 GOD IN HIS WORLD 


This is the voice of faith speaking. Browning 
catches the indomitable note in that voice of faith 
when he sings: 


“TI see my path as birds their trackless way, 
I shall arrive! What time, what circuit first, 
I ask not: but unless God sends His hail 
Or blinding fire balls, sleet or stifling snow, 
In some time, His good time, I shall arrive. 
He guides me and the bird, in His good time.” 


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